Firefox to drop old-tech plug-ins by end of 2016
Mozilla yesterday announced that it will follow in Google's footsteps and bar virtually all plug-ins built using a decades-old technology by the end of next year.
"Mozilla intends to remove support for most NPAPI plugins in Firefox by the end of 2016," wrote Benjamin Smedberg, a Mozilla senior engineering manager, in a Thursday post to his firm's blog.
One major exception, said Smedberg, will be Adobe Flash, which will continue to be supported by Firefox.
NPAPI (Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface) is the plug-in standard that harks back to Netscape, the 1990s browser that Microsoft buried in its antitrust-triggering battle over the browser market. NPAPI has long been the most popular plug-in standard, and is still supported by Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and Opera Software's Opera.
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