Chrome Version 42; The answer to life, the universe and everything?
Not for much longer as Google have deprecated NPAPI, NPAPI stands for Netscape Plug-in API. A feature of Chrome to allow extensions to interface with the local machine.
This doesn’t come as a surprise though, Google started their efforts to remove support more than a year ago. Google have kept the option to re-enable the support for NPAPI of you really, really need it, however, they do plan to remove the functionality as of September this year.
The disabling of this feature will mean a large impact to several extensions and plugins that are available for the browser, such as Java. Chrome will now refuse to run the Java plugin as default. Severely minimizing the attack vector against the browser and more importantly, your personal data.
Apps have now started to be removed from the Google Web Store now. Google state the following:
“In April 2015 (Chrome 42) NPAPI support will be disabled by default in Chrome and we will unpublish extensions requiring NPAPI plugins from the Chrome Web Store. All NPAPI plugins will appear as if they are not installed, as they will not appear in the navigator.plugins list nor will they be instantiated (even as a placeholder). Although plugin vendors are working hard to move to alternate technologies, a small number of users still rely on plugins that haven’t completed the transition yet. We will provide an override for advanced users (via chrome://flags/#enable-npapi) and enterprises (via Enterprise Policy) to temporarily re-enable NPAPI (via the page action UI) while they wait for mission-critical plugins to make the transition. In addition, setting any of the plugin Enterprise policies (e.g. EnabledPlugins, PluginsAllowedForUrls) will temporarily re-enable NPAPI.”
The team are not the only people pushing for the end of Java in the web browser. The developers of Minecraft and the US government have taken serious steps to mitigate user exposure to the exploits of Java vulnerabilities.
Thanks to TheRegister for this information
Image courtesy of ikinja
