Mozilla’s also banishing NPAPI plugins by December 2016, confining the Netscape-derived format to its grave. Nearly all the old extensions that offer extended multimedia features will be disabled on the browser, with Adobe Flash being the only exception.
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Microsoft’s new Edge browser, which launched with Windows 10, has similarly eschewed plugin support.
“Because Adobe Flash is still a common part of the Web experience for most users, we will continue to support Flash within Firefox as an exception to the general public policy”, says Benjamin Smedberg, Mozilla’s manager of Firefox quality engineering. Mozilla has announced that it intends to remove support for web plugins by the end of 2016. Firefox began this process about three years ago with manual plugin activation, allowing users to activate plugins only when they were necessary.
If Mozilla sticks to its update-every-six-week schedule, NPAPI support would be ditched no later than in Firefox 52, which is slated to ship December. 27, 2016.
So what this would imply to the numerous countless number of browser-based games that depend on Unity Web Player to work?
“Plugins are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users”, the outfit argues.
As Java is among the widely-used web sources for many webmasters, Mozilla is closely working with the Oracle Java Platform Group to provide a “smooth transition” for sites that use Java.
Site owners and developers still relying on the likes of Java and Silverlight are being encouraged to investigate alternative technologies that can achieve the same things.
The move by Mozilla mirrors that of other modern browsers such as Google Chrome, which has also pulled support for old-style plug-ins by means of a gradual strategy of disabling automatic support for NPAPI plug-ins.
“Mozilla has been steadily improving the Web platform to support features that were once only available via NPAPI plugins”, it said in a blog.
The web browser maker has also partnered with Unity to enable Unity-based content to be available directly in the web browser without requiring any third-party plugins.
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In the rare cases where a site needs to extend Web technologies, the recommended solution is to develop the additional features as a Firefox add-on.
