Chrome removing support for NPAPI this coming year

[Ziggy]

I use Chrome at work and I like it OK, but I use Fire Fox on my own PCs for a few (silly) reasons.

1) In Chrome, I dislike that the URL box is also the search box. I like the way the search box works in Fire Fox. Switching between my favorite search engines is fast and easy.

2) I hate the way the Ctrl+F search works in Chrome. The search box will disappear when you leave the page you're on and you have to hit Ctrl+F to bring it back up. I really hate that, it makes doing certain things a pain.

3) This is my most important point: In Fire Fox, I can hit Ctrl+B to bring up the favorites side bar AND IT HAS A SEARCH BOX!!! I have a ton of bookmarks and I don't even bother organizing them anymore. Even if I did organize them, it would still take a while to find certain things. Using this method in Fire Fox, finding a bookmark takes two seconds. I can even use tags when creating bookmarks to ensure that I find them as fast as possible.

If Chrome had bookmarks work like this, I'd have much less of a preferences between the two. I have no stability problems with either. The thing I really like about Chrome tho is how Flash is built in so you never have to worry about installing or updating it because it just updates with the browser.

[Gunstar Green]

I switched to Chrome a few years ago and liked how it synced up with other devices, but it looks like I'll be switching again if this is the case.

[ExedExes]

That's big news if Chrome is going to stop plugins.

First Firefox started that rapid release schedule to keep up with Chrome's version number, then just before version 30 they made their default GUI exactly like Chrome. Is Chrome doing something right?

I use FF anyway. If you want that pre-30 FF look, get Classic Theme Restorer. Just as good looking as it used to be.

[darsparx]

Thing is it's not complete "no plugins" it's just everyone of them using the old architecture that's not as secure as the one they've made(since the old allows access to OS while theirs runs in a sandbox compared). At least that's what I gathered when I went looking around(even though I use firefox so it doesn't matter and it hasn't changed looks on mac on 34.0.5 at least as far as I can tell....)

[Tanooki]

I was thinking it was something like that picking and choosing plugins depending how they're created and with what, but it's not so easy to go digging and find out what each one makes unless you know where to look if that's broadcasted. I do use Unity Engine and a few other on the chopping block which is where the concern came from on top of Adblock and FVD Downloader too. I think it will come down to watching the chrome rollout and see what stops working next year.

I miss firefox in all fairness but with it being not on IOS(I have an iphone 5s) and the sync used to be just awful with codes that wouldn't work sometimes even if you did the process right I gave up on it along with the memory holes. I think they've cleaned up a good bit and sync is smooth now too so I can really go either way. I do agree I miss the bookmarked handling/search it has in FF.

[Erik_Twice]

Facebook no longer works for me on Chrome and several sites are getting issues so I'm really considering a switch to Firefox.

Any recommendations? Thoughts?

[darsparx]

@tanook supposedly unity is working on a work around(which would involve most of the games that run in it rebuilding) to run in opengl which is built in to systems anyways(did a lot more reading than I should've even though I'm half tempted to use chrome or safari if only for the fact they would sync without hassle or jailbreak). Also going to be interesting to see how netflix on html5 works even though I generally watching tv shows on my computer if i can help it since netflix crashes either firefox or safari(I think it's firefox) and so does ebay. Though I have all three...

[lisalover1]

Here's my guess about why they're doing this: Having OS-independent browser apps would make things like higher-end browser games forced to be platform-agnostic, which particularly helps Google's Chromebook initiative. In that respect, it's nice, but as everyone has said, compatibility is going to be a mess for a while. :/

[isiolia]

Here's my guess about why they're doing this: Having OS-independent browser apps would make things like higher-end browser games forced to be platform-agnostic, which particularly helps Google's Chromebook initiative. In that respect, it's nice, but as everyone has said, compatibility is going to be a mess for a while. :/

It's probably just along the speed/security lines that they've stated, as that's why IE dropped support for them, and why Firefox disables most by default as well.

[Niode]

The title of this topic is very misleading and borderline trolling. They're not removing plugins, they're removing support for NPAPI. Which will cause some plugins to no longer work. That doesn't stop the developers of those plugins seeking a different implementation or using a different API. For example Netflix are moving away from requiring Silverlight altogether.