In a recent blog post, Mozilla announced that it will stop supporting most of its plugins by the end of 2016. Mozilla reportedly has been using the NPAPI plugins to improve its Web platform and now when all its features like advanced graphics, video streaming and gaming features have become native Web APIs, the company has decided to dump all its NPAPI plugins for Firefox web browser. Adobe Flash, which is the most commonly used plugin will still continue to be a part of Firefox, says Mozilla.
As posted on the official blog, “Mozilla and Adobe will continue to collaborate to bring improvements to the Flash experience on Firefox, including on stability and performance, features and security architecture”.
Furthermore, Firefox will also keep supporting Oracle Java plugin for the websites that use Java to load. However, Oracle recommends switching to plugin-free solutions like Java Web Start.
Other modern web platforms like Microsoft and Google have already stopped supporting the NPAPI plugins in their web browsers like Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. Google started removing the plugins in the month of April this year and blocked them completely by September 2015.
However, Mozilla started the manual deactivation of plugins a few year back, where users were allowed to delete a plugin when required. While 64-bit Firefox for Windows has already blocked the NPAPI plugins, it will end completely by the end of next year.
Mozilla has taken this step to improve your web browsing experience and if you still have any queries, you may head over to the Mozilla Blog.
