Chromium Blog
News and developments from the open source browser project
Saying Goodbye to Our Old Friend NPAPI
Monday, September 23, 2013
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.
We feel the web is ready for this transition. NPAPI isn’t supported on mobile devices, and Mozilla plans to make
all plug-ins except the current version of Flash click-to-play by default
. Based on
anonymous Chrome usage data
, we estimate that only six NPAPI plug-ins were used by more than 5% of users in the last month. Still, we appreciate that it will take time to transition away from NPAPI, so we will be rolling out this change in stages.
Starting in January 2014, Chrome will block webpage-instantiated NPAPI plug-ins by default on the Stable channel. To avoid disruption to users, we will temporarily whitelist the most popular NPAPI plug-ins that are not
already blocked
for security reasons. These are:
Silverlight (launched by 15% of Chrome users last month)
Unity (9.1%)
Google Earth (9.1%)
Java (8.9%) *
Google Talk (8.7%)
Facebook Video (6.0%)
*
Already
blocked
by default for security reasons.
In the short term, end users and enterprise administrators will be able to whitelist specific plug-ins. Eventually, however, NPAPI support will be completely removed from Chrome. We expect this to happen before the end of 2014, but the exact timing will depend on usage and user feedback. Note that the built-in Flash plug-in and PDF viewer will be unaffected because
they don’t use NPAPI
.
The Chrome Web Store will also be phasing out NPAPI support. Starting today, no new Apps or Extensions containing NPAPI-based plug-ins will be allowed in the Web Store. Developers will be able to update their existing NPAPI-based Apps and Extensions until May 2014, when updates will be blocked. Also in May, listings for NPAPI-based Apps and Extensions will be removed from the Web Store home page, search results, and category pages. In September 2014, all existing NPAPI-based Apps and Extensions will be unpublished. Existing installations will continue to work until Chrome fully removes support for NPAPI.
There are several alternatives to NPAPI. In cases where standard web technologies are not yet sufficient, developers and administrators can use
NaCl
,
Apps
,
Native Messaging API
, and
Legacy Browser Support
to transition from NPAPI. Moving forward, our goal is to evolve the standards-based web platform to cover the use cases once served by NPAPI.
UPDATES
November 2013: For more details about NPAPI deprecation, see the
NPAPI Deprecation Developer Guide
.
April 2014: NPAPI support was
removed
from Chrome for Linux in release 35.
April 2014: Developers will be able to update Apps and Extensions that use NPAPI until their listings are unpublished in September. This deviation from the original schedule is to allow for security updates.
July 2014: Chrome 37 has switched to a
harder-to-bypass blocking UI
for NPAPI.
Justin Schuh, Security Engineer and Plug-in Retirement Planner
Chrome App Launcher Developer Preview for Mac OS X
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Chrome Apps
now bring the best of productivity, games and more to your desktop. The Chrome App Launcher is available for Windows and Chrome OS, and today we're unveiling the launcher for Mac OS X on the
Chrome Developer Channel
.
The launcher provides an easy way to find and launch your
Chrome Apps
, while at the same time integrating closely with the operating system so that your Chrome Apps behave and feel just like regular native ones. For example, on Macs you can find your Chrome Apps in the launcher, Applications folder, in the Dock and when you do a Spotlight search—just like any other Mac app that you already use.
To get the launcher, just install a Chrome App from the
Chrome Web Store
, such as this
text editor
or
note-taking app
. The first time you install an app, the launcher will show up as an icon in the Dock. Chrome Packaged Apps for the Mac are available in the dev channel of Chrome and will be launched to stable channel soon.
In the meantime, you can
build
your own packaged app,
upload
it to the Chrome Web Store and give all of your users access to it via a direct link. Have questions about this or any other Chrome Apps features? We always welcome your feedback on
Stack Overflow
, our
G+ Developers page
, or our
developer forum
.
Posted by Joe Marini, Chrome Developer Advocate and Apps Aficionado
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