Slashdot Mirror
Google Earth API Will Be Retired On December 12, 2015
An anonymous reader writes Google [on Friday] announced it plans to retire the Google Earth API on December 12, 2015. The reason is simple: Both Chrome and Firefox are removing support for Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plugins due to security reasons, so the API's death was inevitable. The timing makes sense. Last month, Google updated its plan for killing off NPAPI support in Chrome, saying that it would block all plugins by default in January and drop support completely in September. The company also revealed that the Google Earth plugin had dropped in usage from 9.1 percent of Chrome users in October 2013 to 0.1 percent in October 2014. Add dwindling cross-platform support (particularly on mobile devices), and we're frankly surprised the announcement didn't come sooner.
So what is NPAPI being replaced with across the browsers, please?
In Chrome, PPAPI. New versions of Adobe Flash Player already use it. In Firefox, asm.js. Adobe Flash Player is the only NPAPI plug-in that Firefox shall allow.
PPAPI is the modern interface for plugins.
By "modern" you mean Google Chrome only, right? Vendor lock-in does seem to be what "modern" means these days mostly.
First, Adobe can choose to make Adobe Flash Player for PPAPI available only through Google. Second, PPAPI is not frozen. Google can change behaviors behind Mozilla's back.
Because then Mozilla will go through all that effort to implement PPAPI but then Google will change PPAPI on a whim and it will break all the plugins on Firefox and people will ignorantly blame Mozilla, and then Mozilla will have to put all that effort into updating to the latest random revision of PPAPI only to rinse and repeat.