Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge have already announced the same thing on pulling their support for these types of plugins, and Mozilla is looking at making the same transition as well.
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Unity is swimming against the current here; Adobe already announced that it is shutting down its legion of Flash-based titles.
“Mozilla intends to remove support for most NPAPI plugins in Firefox by the end of 2016”.
NPAPI allowed browsers to run complex plugins which leveraged audio, video, and underlying OS functions in an era when Web technology was in its infancy.
Smedberg continues: “Mozilla and Adobe will continue to collaborate to bring improvements to the Flash experience on Firefox, including on stability and performance, features and security architecture”.
“Plugins are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users”, Firefox argues. Other browsers have chose to move away from plugin support and focus their development on other Web technologies. “Site maintainers should prepare for plugins to stop working in all versions of Firefox by the end of 2016”. The non-profit also announced that since new Firefox platforms do not have to support an existing ecosystem of users and plugins, new platforms such as 64-bit Firefox for Windows will launch without plugin support.
“Mozilla has been steadily improving the Web platform to support features that were once only available via NPAPI plugins”, it said in a blog.
For now, websites that may still be using plug-ins such as Silverlight or Java should accelerate their transition to native Web technologies, he advised.
The game engine no longer recommends the use of its Web Player; Unity 5.4, expected in March 2016, will not ship with Web Player support.
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This also means Unity Web Player-based content will operate directly in the browser, without plugins. There are a few plugin-free solutions like Java Web Start that would take place of the now used Java applets on sites to deliver a smoother experience. If you play a Unity-based browser game, one solution is to keep the final NPAPI-supporting version of Firefox-or a Firefox-based alternative-around so you can continue to play.
