Seems like every couple months people start crying ‘the sky is falling’ with Firefox and Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plugins. Earlier this week there was a flurry of activity with Bug 1165981. Again people seem to think that Firefox is not going support NPAPI plugins anymore on Windows since the 64-Bit (Win64) versions does not (except for Flash). As a reminder the removal of NPAPI support only applies to the Win64 version of Firefox. The 32-bit Windows version still supports all the NPAPI plugins including Java and Silverlight. However, Mozilla does plan on discontinuing support in the future with the Firefox 32-bit Windows version.
It also important to understand that Chrome stopped supporting NPAPI plugins long ago (they have their own custom version of Flash integrated into the browser) and Microsoft’s Edge (Windows 10) browser has never supported NPAPI plugins. In reference to Java, Oracle has announced they will discontinue the Java plugin in the future (late 2016). I will post more about this in greater detail on my Tech Blog shortly.
