Will NaCl for Browser extension be Deprecated in Q1 2018?

[Nimbus Web]

We develop one of the most popular (over million people) Screenshot Extension which also records screencasts:

We user NaCl (not PNaCl) to convert videos, trim, crop etc. We recently discovered your announcement here 

https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/migration

Do you plan to stop supporting PNaCl only or both?  We as the developers haven't received any email from you about that. We discovered that just accidentally... 

Thank you. 

[The Floating Brain]

I would be interested to hear if NaCl will stop being supported as well, bump.

[Thang Duong]

I am also interested in this question.  Will NaCl also be deprecated or just PNaCl?  The deprecation note says PNaCl and then (P)NaCl.  What does that mean?

[Russell Valentine]

To me it is clear that it is both.

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[Thang Duong]

How did you come to this conclusion?

All the notices say PNaCl.  PNaCl clearly overlaps with Wasm in functionality and purpose.  NaCl does not.

Would be great to get a definitive answer from Google.

[Russell Valentine]

They have similar functionality and purpose. NaCl was just first. For a long while documentation has stated PNaCl is preferred. It seems clear to me when discussed in documentation native client is talking about both. Like you mentioned in your email, the migration guide has a title "(P)NaCl Deprecation Announcements". I think it is hard to make it more clear than "we plan to focus our native code efforts on WebAssembly going forward" in the migration guide.

I'm not very happy about it myself, I use a lot of network code with NaCl and there is no webassembly equivalent for what I do.

This may not be helpful for your situation, but maybe you would be interested in nw.js

http://docs.nwjs.io/en/latest/For%20Users/Advanced/Use%20NaCl%20in%20NW.js/#use-nacl-in-nwjs

It is my understanding that nw.js hopes to support NaCl for quite a while however I do not find any statement about that on their website, so maybe something to ask on their mailing list.

You are of course free to hold your breathe for a official google reply, but it is solid for me.

Russell Valentine

[Derek Schuff]

The Q2 2019 deprecation announcement (https://groups.google.com/d/topic/native-client-discuss/oMHnO-6RAas/discussion) refers to PNaCl on the open web; not to PNaCl in Chrome apps or extensions, and not to native NaCl (which is allowed only in Chrome apps and extensions). Chrome apps are already deprecated on Windows, Mac, and Linux (https://blog.chromium.org/2016/08/from-chrome-apps-to-web.html) but not actually disabled yet; further announcements about Chrome apps or extensions would also cover NaCl and PNaCl support.

[Thang Duong]

This leaves one last item to be checked off: native NaCl on chrome extensions.

Seems the writing is on the wall.  The question is when they'll announce it officially.