Mozilla Continues Moving Away From NPAPI Plugins

[ssokolow]

Now why can't FF move towards PPAPI, as Google isn't preventing Mozilla from using that plugin platform. Oracle should implement a PPAPI plugin for Java for those who need Java support in any browser on Linux.

PPAPI grew out of Google's efforts to replace NPAPI with "Pepper API", which Google invited Mozilla to collaborate on. However, Mozilla pulled out because aspects of Pepper's design expected the browser's innards to match how Chrome did things and Google wasn't interested in changing that.

It's sort of like a far less severe version of how you could never run Firefox extensions in other browsers because they've got unfettered access to browser innards. (Which is why, if you look at an extension like NoScript which has been around for a long time and hooks the browser deeply, you'll see a ton of "If Firefox version X, do Y" code.)

While it is possible to shim PPAPI into NPAPI, it's the same sort of ugly hack as using Wine to run Windows plugins in Linux browsers (which is what Pipelight does for Silverlight).

[i-rinat]

FreshPlayer is a wrapper to convert PPAPI calls from Pepper Flash to NPAPI calls in Firefox (hence why it doesn't support PPAPI's sandboxing).

Sandbox is absent just because it wasn't implemented, not because it's not possible at all. One could modify code to launch a separate process with sandboxed PepperFlash and pass data back and forth. But message serialization, efficiency and synchronization issues... I must admit that's huge and difficult task.

If NPAPI is removed for everything but flash, then FreshPlayer will stop working as well.

That's not true. Just think about how Firefox would detect that particular plugin is Flash player. It would be supported MIME types and/or plugin description string. FreshPlayerPlugin have both identical. So until NPAPI disabled completely, freshwrapper will continue work.