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InfoQ Homepage News Firefox Will No Longer Support Plug-ins Except for Flash

Firefox Will No Longer Support Plug-ins Except for Flash

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Mozilla has announced the end of NPAPI in Firefox by the end of 2016, the only plug-in continuing to be supported being Flash.

A 20 years old technology, NPAPI (Netscape Plugin API) has drawn criticism from Google that it is a “leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity.” Google decided that Chrome would no longer support it, which happened this year. Microsoft has also decided that their latest browser, Edge, will no longer support ActiveX plug-ins, forcing developers to develop solutions using web APIs.

Following suit, Mozilla has recently announced that will phase out support for NPAPI in Firefox, giving developers some time to port their plug-ins until the end of 2016. Benjamin Smedberg, Manager of Firefox Quality Engineering at Mozilla, said in a blog post that, indeed, plug-ins have become a “source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users” and “site maintainers should prepare for plugins to stop working in all versions of Firefox by the end of 2016.” He considers that this move is possible now because much of the functionality which was previously available only through plug-ins has been included in the browser. He also added that the upcoming Firefox 64-bit for Windows will not support plug-ins.

One exception will be Flash, Mozilla deciding to continue supporting it because “Flash is still a common part of the Web experience for most users.” But Unity, Java, Silverlight, Adobe Acrobat will have to go. And some developers have complained that their products need access to native APIs. Smedberg recommended to either switch to a pure native application, recompile the plug-in to asm.js or Webassembly, or re-write them to use the new web APIs available in Firefox. He also mentioned that Mozilla will continue to “prioritize features that will make it possible for sites to switch away from plugins.”

The only major browser we do not know what will do about NPAPI is Safari. It is quite likely Apple will move away from it especially now that Mozilla has decided to stop supporting it.

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Community comments

  • Guess what

    by Iyigun Cevik,

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

    I uninstalled flash plugin last year. From all my browsers. Apart from one site, I didn't have any problems so far. Most sites migrated to or at least supports html5.

    The only site I'm having problem is infoq. Presentations are only available with flash player. Such a shame!

  • Infoq and others

    by Dzmitry Lahoda,

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

    I wrote once in July to infoq, and got response that "We're currently working on a new player that doesn't use Flash would like to launch some time in Autumn."

    In enterprise I work for (50k+ workers) JIVE The Hub social network used, which has flash to show videos and documents. Both peaces are crappy. I hope they will migrate somewhere.

  • Re: Guess what

    by Charles Humble,

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

    Hi Iyigun,

    Yes we know - sorry! We're working as fast as we can on a new version of our video Player that is Flash free. The hope is to be able to launch an initial version during the course of this Autumn.

    Charles
    Head of editorial, InfoQ.com

  • Re: Guess what

    by Dzmitry Lahoda,

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

    I can watch html5 in android. Why not in windows firefox.

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