Chrome, Firefox, and NPAPI support

We’ve hired a developer to build a Unity3D game for both iOS and web. The web version was built over the summer using the Unity web player, which no longer works on Chrome since NPAPI support was dropped. The developer is trying to pawn the web version off to us advising that it works for Firefox, and that is good enough. The contract explicitly states the target browser is Chrome, and therefore we have the option of declining the web part of the project.

The game is part of a research project, and although far from ideal, Firefox support may meet our needs. Our biggest concern is that Firefox and other browsers may follow suit and drop support for the NPAPI plugin, thus rendering the game obsolete, potentially before the two year study is complete. Is it a safe bet NPAPI plugin support is on its way out within the next couple of years?

Chrome has killed it.
New Edge browser doesn’t support it.
Safari has it behind the clickwall similar to the way Chrome started.

So the chances of plugins going away for good in the future are pretty high.

Firefox is not going to drop support. See this Firefox thread. Other browsers however, did kill it. Those who haven’t yet, will in the future.

WebGL does however work in all browsers. This requires a 64-bit os though. Most people have 64-bit, and those who don’t, will in the near future.

I’m not too worried about this, as a big part of the world is using Firefox (me included). All of the people I know use Firefox by choice, and we have Windows 10 (with the Edge browser thingy).

So much for Firefox not dropping support, this world is so crazy and unstable and nobody is above the almighty commercialism sellout trend, not even Firefox.

Everyone is under the rule of the new generation of iPeople and Google/Droid sellouts. If it isn’t into the make a quick buck sheep exploitation protocol the members of the board vote it out and the normal people are sucked along for the ride all the while being made to believe it was their choice all along instead of a corporate control scheme, but whatever.

Sorry for the rant but I have been analyzing this trend for a while and watching it unfold as predicted is more irritating than I anticipated.

I guess we have no choice but to be swept along on this ride of commercialistic hostile takeover of what little control we thought we still had. If you look back as all these revolutionary breakthroughs have been unfolding over the last 15 years or so 1 thing is constant, user control has slowly and systematically been removed at such a slow rate that they were hoping we wouldn’t notice. You remember the whole reason for Firefox’s creation? Clean and controlled internet browsing in security…

The world we live in is continuing to degrade, economically, spiritually, ethically, morally, so why should we be surprised to see it electronically as well I guess.

Sorry for the rant, but this is a bit frustrating.