NPAPI plug-ins in Windows 8 Metro mode

[Tadeusz Kozak]

Hi all,

Quite recently I've came across this blog post: http://blog.chromium.org/2012/07/npapi-plug-ins-in-windows-8-metro-mode.html. Important quote:

We recently announced initial support for Chrome in Windows 8 Metro mode. One thing that early testers may have noticed is that some existing plug-ins don't work. These plug-ins are built using a technology called NPAPI, which, like ActiveX, is not compatible with Windows 8 Metro mode. 

Do you think that NPAPI as an interface/API is about to be forgotten? Do you have any plans to support pepper? Do you know maybe anything about other browsers vendors supporting pepper or any other technology that will allow implementation of native extension of a browser?  

Regards,

Ted

[Tadeusz Kozak]

To answer my own question:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729481 

It seem that FF team does not want to support the pepper interface

[Richard Bateman]

Windows 8 Metro mode doesn't support any plugins; IE in metro mode doesn't support ActiveX controls.  Chrome has allowed their own plugin API, of course, but it's not worth trying to support unless it works on other browsers as well, which as you say it won't.

Richard

[Richard Bateman]

Actually this is great news; we already knew that Chrome would be blocking NPAPI in metro mode, but this way there is at least a visual indicator from Chrome that somethign is trying to work but requires desktop mode to do so.

This is better than not being able to use plugins and the user not knowing anything about it.

Richard

On Oct 11, 2012, at 4:52 PM, Ozzy wrote:

Very bad news:

Chromium - Issue 153648: Block NPAPI plug-ins in Metro mode

In Metro mode, we should still load NPAPI plug-ins (i.e. show them in navigator.plugins), but block them

Is Chromium an open-source browser project?

[Sylvain]

I was asked today if a Firebreath plugin could work on Chrome OS. It seems like Chrome on Chrome OS has the same limitations as Chrome on metro mode, only offering Pepper interface. Do you have a rough idea on what it would take to add Pepper API to Firebreath?

[Richard Bateman]

Not really.  I haven't really had a good reason to spend time looking into it.  I looked at it once before and it looked promising, but that's been years.  There hasn't really been a compelling reason to pursue it, though it's looking a little more likely that there might be as time passes.

If you want to find a list of resources that I could use to briefly get an idea of how PPAPI plugins work I could probably find some time to look into it a bit, anyway.

Richard

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[Sylvain]

Hi Richard,

Google has set up a pretty fancy and comprehensive documentation but it seems to me that it is much more involved than making an NPAPI-compliant library. The library must also be compiled with a specific toolchain, which, if I understand correctly, would not make it possible to build one dll/so/dylib for all.

Here is their web page
https://developers.google.com/native-client/

Sylvain