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InfoQ Homepage News Chrome 42 Disables NPAPI and Related Plug-ins: Java, Unity, Silverlight

Chrome 42 Disables NPAPI and Related Plug-ins: Java, Unity, Silverlight

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As outlined in the NPAPI Deprecation Guide, Chrome 42, which was due this month and was recently released to the stable channel, has disabled support for the Netscape Plug-in API. The reason is that NPAPI “has become a leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity” and the intent was first announced in 2013.

NPAPI plug-ins were blocked since January 2014, but some of the popular ones were whitelisted, including Java, Unity, Silverlight, Facebook Video, and a couple of others. In January 2015, the respective plug-ins were blocked by default, but the user could enable them for specific websites. Now, the NPAPI itself is disabled, and the plug-ins using it no longer appear on the chrome://plugins/ page.

Mac OS and Windows users can enable NPAPI through its flag on the chrome://flags/ page, and enterprise administrators are still able to whitelist related plug-ins through the EnabledPlugins policy list. This solution will work until September when support for NPAPI will be completely removed from Chrome.

NPAPI is still used by several Mozilla projects, including Firefox, and Apple’s Safari. Nonetheless, Mozilla mentions on their developer site that “plug-ins are now a legacy technology” and advises website developers to “avoid using plugins wherever possible”. 

We have not heard of any plans from Oracle or Microsoft intending to port their plug-ins to use Chrome’s Native Client.

Update. After the publishing of this article, Oracle has provided instructions on using Java on Chrome 42. Among others, they suggest switching to Firefox, IE or Safari. No word on porting the Java plug-in to use the Native Client.

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Community comments

  • Oracle

    by Richard Bywater,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    We have not heard of any plans from Oracle or Microsoft intending to port their plug-ins to use Chrome’s Native Client.


    Why Oracle hasn't really stated what their plans are regarding Java & Chrome is amazing. Given the popularity of Chrome then one would think they'd at least announce that they will or will not support it going forward.

  • Re: Oracle

    by Andy Newman,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Oracle has announced their plans. They recommend that user's switch to Firefox.

    java.com/en/download/faq/chrome.xml

  • Re: Oracle

    by Abel Avram,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Oracle has put up the respective page (or at least the first section) after the publishing of this article. I updated the article to mention this.
    I would add that they still have not said anything about porting the plug-in to use Native Client instead of NPAPI.

  • Microsoft

    by Stefan Hüttenrauch,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Are there news from Microsoft about fixing this issue, yet? We are facing difficulties with apps that are using the Office Authentication Plug-in that also runs on NPAPI.
    (Changing the browser strategy of our customers should not be the way to go ;-))

  • Re: Microsoft

    by Abel Avram,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I haven't heard of anything from MS, and I would not expect any fix on this.

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