NPAPI And The Hot-Pluggable World Wide Web
Hackaday••technology
Key Points:
- NPAPI browser plugins, once common for extending browsers, have mostly disappeared due to security concerns, but they offer capabilities that modern JavaScript and WebAssembly (WASM) approaches struggle to replicate, especially in advanced networking like UDP support.
- Modern browsers limit plugin support and focus on restrictive extensions, with Google's Manifest V3 further tightening these constraints, while NPAPI plugins allow direct access to OS-level features and rendering capabilities, exemplified by legacy tools like Flash and VLC plugins.
- The WASI Sockets proposal for WASM may eventually provide some low-level network access, but it remains limited and inconsistently supported across browsers, making NPAPI a more straightforward solution for applications requiring UDP broadcast and service discovery.
- Documentation and resources for NPAPI development
