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:5, Insightful)
That may be, but why don't we "evolve" this other thing to cover all the existing use cases BEFORE disabling NPAPI?
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Re:"standards-based web platform" (Score:2, Insightful)
NaCl supports only a tiny subset of NPAPI functionality, it's also not portable beyond i386 and armel.
To which still-manufacturer-supported platforms is NPAPI portable?
Re:If not NaCl or JS, then what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. I am against both. Cross platform programming as an Interpreter running in a sandbox (JavaScript) or a bytecode VM (Java, NaCl...) shouldn't be done through the browser.
The Internet should be slightly expanded HTML1 and CGI as far as I'm concerned. Maybe with an exception for audio\video if we can agree on a codec...
Keep application development and serving to the likes of Android's Play Store + Dalvik.
Re:"standards-based web platform" (Score:3, Insightful)
Isnt NPAPI just another "de facto" standard anyways? Pretty sure the "N" stands for "netscape", not "W3C" or "IETF" or "RFC".
Re:If not NaCl or JS, then what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing stops you from only writing a webpage thats HTML1 with no JS; just dont be surprised when noone wants to visit it.
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Re:If not NaCl or JS, then what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If not NaCl or JS, then what? (Score:4, Insightful)
there's no justification for running applications in a document viewer.
Except that most of the world finds it pretty convenient, and anything we've called a web browser in the last 15 years or so has been much more than a document viewer.
If Google is so concerned with serving up cross platform applications, they can package a VM and an App Store along with their browser.
They do. The V8 Javascript Engine is implemented as a VM. They include the Chrome Web Store in the desktop version of their browser as well. That doesn't mean that it's not beneficial to run apps delivered over the web in the browser, the way that every other vendor does.
Is it really too much to expect something better then serving GUIs the likes of Facebook and Gmail inside the browser?
And what's wrong with it? A sandboxed plugin API and Javascript VM makes more sense to me than downloading a native app to handle the same thing, and I down see a benefit to having a some kind of Net-VM app, separate from the browser, to run web apps in. Either way, you're still talking about running someone else's code. From that perspective, keeping the browser integrated with a sandboxed scripting and plugin environment makes more sense than any alternatives I've heard anyone propose.