NPAPI being dropped end of 2016?

[Jeff McWilliams]

According to Benjamin Smedberg's Oct 8th blog posting,

"Mozilla intends to remove support for most NPAPI plugins in Firefox by the end of 2016."

And "Site maintainers should prepare for plugins to stop working in all versions of Firefox by the end of 2016."

This seems to be a change from earlier assurances that NPAPI support in Firefox was not going away.

Is this correct?

Thanks,

Jeff McWilliams
Development Manager, Altair HyperView

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 10/9/2015 12:26 PM, Jeff McWilliams wrote:
> According to Benjamin Smedberg's Oct 8th blog posting,
>
> "Mozilla intends to remove support for most NPAPI plugins in Firefox by the end of 2016."
>
> And "Site maintainers should prepare for plugins to stop working in all versions of Firefox by the end of 2016."
>
> This seems to be a change from earlier assurances that NPAPI support in Firefox was not going away.

NPAPI has already been marked as a legacy technology. I have said that
NPAPI won't go away without fair warning. This announcement is our
notice that we've decided to go ahead and plan this change, giving
people 15 months or so of warning.

--BDS

[Jeff McWilliams]

Thanks, Ben.

Our HyperWorks Desktop product is a CAE suite that includes a HTML report generating capability. The HTML reports have the option to embed our HyperView Player as a browser plugin, so that the user can interact with a live CAE post-processing model from within the browser window.

What's the recommended path to replace our NPAPI based plugin? Our existing plugin leverages a lot of C++ code and libraries shared with our full HyperWorks Desktop suite. I don't think rewriting our code in JS + WebGL is realistic.

Is it possible to write a Firefox extension that launches a copy of our plugin residing on the user's disk, and passes it the referenced CAE file to run out-of-proc?

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 10/9/2015 12:58 PM, Jeff McWilliams wrote:
> Thanks, Ben.
>
> Our HyperWorks Desktop product is a CAE suite that includes a HTML report generating capability. The HTML reports have the option to embed our HyperView Player as a browser plugin, so that the user can interact with a live CAE post-processing model from within the browser window.
>
> What's the recommended path to replace our NPAPI based plugin? Our existing plugin leverages a lot of C++ code and libraries shared with our full HyperWorks Desktop suite. I don't think rewriting our code in JS + WebGL is realistic.

I don't know what the libraries do, but it might be realistic to
recompile them into asm.js/webassembly. Certainly we're seeing a lot of
companies have success with this kind of approach, and it means that you
have a truly cross-platform export solution.

>
> Is it possible to write a Firefox extension that launches a copy of our plugin residing on the user's disk, and passes it the referenced CAE file to run out-of-proc?

That also depends on what the file does. It is and will be possible for
a Firefox addon to launch executables and send data back and forth via a
pipe. So if you just need your binary code to perform calculations, that
would probably work. But by design it won't be possible for the binary
code to render on the screen. We intentionally want to focus rendering
on web technologies, either real markup or canvas or webgl.

--BDS