Mozilla will kill "most" NPAPI plugins in Firefox almost two years after Google took the same action with Chrome. Back in September 2014, Google announced that NPAPI support would be removed starting in January 2015. Mozilla is now playing catch-up, and plans to end NPAPI support by the end of 2016.
When Google announced its decision, speed, stability, and security were cited as reasons for ditching plugins, and Mozilla is taking much the same line. The company also points out that many features and functions that only used to be possible through the use of NPAPI plugins can now be achieved through native web APIs. But what is this going to mean for users?
Mozilla hopes that the move will help to boost performance and security, and the company freely admits that it is following in the footsteps of Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Moving forward, new Firefox platforms -- such as 64-bit Firefox for Windows -- will launch without support for plugins. Anyone hoping that this could signal the true death of Flash is going to be disappointed.
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 plugin policy. 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.
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. Mozilla warns:
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. Site maintainers should prepare for plugins to stop working in all versions of Firefox by the end of 2016.
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