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."
A pox on both houses. (Score:3, Interesting)
NaCl is a good implementation of a terrible idea: i.e Running software in the browser is all kinds of wrong.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? (Score:3, Interesting)
Mark my words: Chrome is going to end up being a second IE 6-like millstone around the IT industrys neck. We are already seeing web sites that only work in Chrome (and Safari, if you're lucky). Firefox, IE (!), and whichever intrepid fourth party browser engines still exist on the periphery, will be reduced to second-class citizens..
The new IE is here (Score:4, Interesting)
More and more Chrome is reminding me of IE from the humble IE 4 which was the best browser to the jaguarnut of IE 6 which still has not completely died off yet in China and some corporate portals.
Chrome rushes to throw HTML 5 and CSS 3 features not standardized on W3C so they can pass HTML5test and calls them HTML 5 and CSS 3 but really are made just like box model and CSS were invented by IE. The W3C in the end decided to make it a little different which is why when Firefox went one way the corps hung onto IE 6 instead.
This NACL and plugins is all 21st activeX to me. If MS did this for IE 11 everyone would be screaming bloody murder.