Mozilla to drop NPAPI plugins from Firefox

But a developer stated that the latest developments made by Google, Microsoft and Mozilla would change that scenario, and Unity states that Mozilla Firefox’s support for plugins is nearing extinction while Microsoft’s Edge provides no support at all. 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. While running the plugins, Firefox became increasingly vulnerable to security threats, reduced its speed and lost overall stability. “Plugins are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users”. Moving forward, new Firefox platforms – such as 64-bit Firefox for Windows – will launch without support for plugins.

Even though plugins are going away, Flash will continue to receive special status in Firefox, as it does with Chrome.

As part of our plugin strategy, Mozilla and Unity are proud to jointly announce a close collaboration and an aligned roadmap that will enable Unity-based content to be experienced directly in the browser without plugins. Mozilla has announced that it intends to remove support for web plugins by the end of 2016. Nearly all the old extensions that offer extended multimedia features will be disabled on the browser, with Adobe Flash being the only exception. Mozilla notes that Flash is still one of the most common part of the Web experience for many users and for this reason Firefox will continue to support Flash as an exception to the general plugin policy.

Again consistent with the other browsers, especially Chrome, Mozilla says that it will be working with Adobe to bring performance and stability improvements to its Flash support.

“Mozilla continues to work with the Oracle Java Platform Group to ensure a smooth transition for those web sites that use Java”, it said.

Mozilla urged websites and publishers which now use plug-ins (such as Silverlight or Java) to “accelerate their transition to Web technologies”.

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.