Mozilla Firefox will drop support for NPAPI plugins by the end of 2016 but will keep Flash around
Mozilla today announced its intention to remove Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plugin support from Firefox “by the end of 2016.” The company has been working …
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement caps a rough year for plugins in Firefox. In July, Mozilla went so far as to deactivate all versions of Flash by default until Adobe shipped security patches, and weeks later it laid out a plan to replace its legacy add-on APIs with one that makes porting extensions from other browsers easier. Dropping NPAPI extends that same cleanup from add-ons to plugins.
First-order effects
- Developers of NPAPI-dependent Firefox plugins lose their distribution path by the end of 2016, while enterprise sites still running Java, Silverlight, or other plugin content face a migration deadline.
- Flash is the sole survivor: Mozilla's explicit exception means Adobe's runtime keeps privileged status in Firefox even as every other plugin is cut off.
Second-order effects
- Adobe's Flash exception becomes a dependency both ways — after Mozilla's default-off move over security holes, keeping Flash alive ties Firefox's plugin security posture directly to Adobe's patch cadence.
- Plugin vendors whose runtimes survive on other browsers now have one fewer major host, pushing them toward web-standard alternatives like the WebAssembly work that later landed in Firefox 52 alongside the NPAPI shutdown itself.
Third-order effects
- The endgame arrived two years later when Adobe announced it would stop updating and distributing Flash entirely at the end of 2020 — confirming that browser-by-browser plugin removal was the prelude to the technology's outright death.
- Browsers consolidating around standards-based extension and app APIs point toward a web where native-code plugins no longer exist as a category, leaving HTML, JavaScript, and compiled-to-web technologies as the only delivery mechanisms.
The trend: Browsers are systematically retiring native plugin architectures in favor of web standards, with Flash's long tail of security problems forcing each vendor to sequence the shutdown.