Unity Webplayer and NPAPI future? How long will it work??
Hello, I have some games made in Unity that run in browsers via Webplayer. Google announced they are dropping NPAPI support from Chrome somewhere in April this year. I am wondering how long there will be a browser capable of running Webplayer because Webplayer depends on NPAPI. Will Mozilla and when drop NPAPI from Firefox??
I'm stuck on Unity 3 so I'm afraid I'll have to rewrite all my games in I don't know what game engine. What scares me most is that I don't know how long my Unity Webplayer games will work. I'm even in the middle of development of another game and all this NPAPI tragedy makes me really frustrated. How long do I have to migrate all my games to another platform?? :(
Best regards, hudibitek
Athraithe ag hudibitek ar
Réiteach roghnaithe
I doubt if discounting NPAPI completely by Mozilla will happen any time soon. IMO, the slow progress made with developing Shumway as an SWF file player might be a key to keeping NPAPI alive. Plus, the Click to Play feature that came about in Firefox 26 probably postponed the discontinuation or eliminating NPAPI completely for quite awhile.
I have seen no announcement (or even official sounding message [blog posting] from anyone working for Mozilla) about the future of NPAPI plugins in Mozilla. But there have been many articles written starting as far back as 2009 about Chrome switching to PPAPI, and Mozilla seems to always be mentioned at the end of those type of articles - kinda lumping them in the same basket with no facts to rationalize the comments made about Mozilla and NPAPI.
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Something big is happening with Unity right now. http://unity3d.com/community
"We've taken unity3d.com off the air while we update it with info about the new game-changing technologies we're announcing at GDC. We'll be back online at about 08:30 PST/17:30 CET."
GDC = Game Developrs Conference taking place March 2-6, 2015 in San Francisco.
Overall, my thoughts are that Plugins will disappear altogether before Mozilla replaces the NPAPI architecture completely. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Plugins "Plugins are now a legacy technology. They are not available on most mobile devices. Mozilla encourages website developers to avoid using plugins wherever possible. If there are plugin features which are not available in the web platform, we encourage developers to post their use cases to mozilla.dev.platform project list, so that Mozilla can prioritize web platform work to make those use cases possible."
Thank you for your reply,
I am aware of the NPAPI status. Unity will enable builds for HTML 5 but I can't use that. As long as there is NPAPI support in some browser Webplayer and my games will work. What I would really want to know is how much time do I have to migrate my games. Few months, a year, till April? Is there some plan to remove NPAPI from Firefox in near future?
Réiteach Roghnaithe
I doubt if discounting NPAPI completely by Mozilla will happen any time soon. IMO, the slow progress made with developing Shumway as an SWF file player might be a key to keeping NPAPI alive. Plus, the Click to Play feature that came about in Firefox 26 probably postponed the discontinuation or eliminating NPAPI completely for quite awhile.
I have seen no announcement (or even official sounding message [blog posting] from anyone working for Mozilla) about the future of NPAPI plugins in Mozilla. But there have been many articles written starting as far back as 2009 about Chrome switching to PPAPI, and Mozilla seems to always be mentioned at the end of those type of articles - kinda lumping them in the same basket with no facts to rationalize the comments made about Mozilla and NPAPI.
Thank you so much on this! Case closed. :D