Google Dropping Netscape Plugin API Support In Chrome/Blink 170
An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced it is dropping Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface support in Chrome. The company will be phasing out support over the coming year, starting with blocking webpage-instantiated plugins in January 2014. Google has looked at anonymous Chrome usage data and estimates that just six NPAPI plug-ins were used by more than 5 percent of users in the last month. To 'avoid disruption' (read: attempt to minimize the confusion) for users, Google will temporarily whitelist the most popular NPAPI plugins: Silverlight, Unity, Google Earth, Google Talk, and Facebook Video."
Google offers NaCl as an alternative, and "Moving forward, our goal is to evolve the standards-based web platform to cover the use cases once served by NPAPI."
Re:"standards-based web platform" (Score:4, Informative)
However, NaCl is definitely not a standard if it's only implemented in a single browser.
Btw, Unity3D already supports NaCl with the same license that supports the web plugin. Silverlight needs to die anyways, and two of those plugins are Google services.
Re:If not NaCl or JS, then what? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the fact that HTML1 doesn't exist stops you. HTML2 was an attempt to document what browsers of the time rendered (i.e. it was descriptive, as opposed to the prescriptive HTML3 and later), but there was no HTML1.
Re:The new IE is here (Score:4, Informative)
From the NaCl FAQ:
Is Native Client open? Is it a standard?
Native Client is completely open: the executable format is open and the source code is open. Right now the Native Client project is in its early stages, so it's premature to consider Native Client for standardization.
You think that NaCl might lock you in to some proprietary standard, but the complete opposite is true: if you want, you can build your own version of HTML and CSS in NaCl, or build your own programming language. Hell, you can build a browser in NaCl.