Google Chrome will no longer support NPAPI from January 2014

Justin Schuh, Security Engineer for Google Chrome has revealed on The Chromium Blog that Google Chrome will no longer support NPAPI (Netscape Plug-in API) based plug-ins from the beginning of next year. The ability to whitelist specific plug-ins will be provided in the short term but all support is likely to be fully dropped by 2015.

The most popular NPAPI plug-ins (that are not already blocked) will be whitelisted by Google as part of the stage by stage change. These are:

• Silverlight (launched by 15% of Chrome users last month)
• Unity (9.1%)
• Google Earth (9.1%)
• Java (8.9%) (already blocked for security)
• Google Talk (8.7%)
• Facebook Video (6.0%)

The built-in Flash plug-in and PDF viewer will not be affected by the change as they are based on PPAPI (Pepper Plugin API).

The Chrome Web Store will also be losing support for NPAPI with all new app or extension submissions containing NPAPI being denied, effective immediately. Currently available items in the Chrome Web store which contain NPAPI will be removed in September 2014 but developers will still be able to update their apps and extensions until then.

It appears that support of NPAPI is being phased out in order to improve security, provide better performance and raise efficiency.

"The Netscape Plug-in API (NPAPI) ushered in an early era of web innovation by offering the first standard mechanism to extend the browser. In fact, many modern web platform features—including video and audio support—first saw mainstream deployment through NPAPI-based plug-ins.

But the web has evolved. Today’s browsers are speedier, safer, and more capable than their ancestors. Meanwhile, NPAPI’s 90s-era architecture has become a leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity. Because of this, Chrome will be phasing out NPAPI support over the coming year."