6 ms·

NPAPI is insecure and dates back to Netscape 2.0. Abandoning a 20 year old technology is really the final nail in the coffin for you?

icebraining 11y ago
Why would one care if the technology is old? Should we drop TCP too? And I don't see how it is insecure by itself; that depends on the plugins themselves, and on the websites we allow to launch them.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Why would one care if the technology is old? Old and insecure was the issue raised by the grandparent. (And I suspect the implied part with old is "has newer alternatives which do not share its security problems".) > And I don't see how it is insecure by itself; that depends on the plugins themselves That the security depends on the plugins themselves is exactly what is insecure about it compared to more effectively sandboxed alternatives.
Koldark 11y ago
It might be. We use several apps that require Silverlight. I am sure Microsoft will update Silverlight in the future to work differently, but I can't do my work without Silverlight.
- lectrick 11y ago
  Silverlight should have never been. HTML5 tech is the way forward and has been for years now. The fact that all of these demos work at the speeds that they do is proof: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Porting-Examples-and-Demos https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Porting-Examples-...
criley2 11y ago
>Abandoning a 20 year old technology is really the final nail in the coffin for you Abandoning a useful technology with zero alternatives, telling the world to "simply get over using those previous functions and adjust to a new reality where you cannot do what you used to do" is the nail in the coffin for me. This is not a case of a legacy technology being dropped for which there are modern superior alternatives. This is a case where a core idea in web functionality has been rethought, and the powers that be have decided that we should not use web browsers in this way at all, and we will not be able to do so moving forward. And if we are given the ability back, it'll be a proprietary, non-standard, vendor hack solution that, in 20 years, will occupy the same space as NPAPI.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > This is not a case of a legacy technology being dropped for which there are modern superior alternatives. On the contrary, that's actually exactly the reason that all browser vendors are phasing out NPAPI (or, in MS's case with Spartan succeeding IE, ActiveX) plug-in technology: it is legacy technology for which there are modern superior alternatives.
- deleted 11y ago
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icebraining 11y ago

Why would one care if the technology is old? Should we drop TCP too? And I don't see how it is insecure by itself; that depends on the plugins themselves, and on the websites we allow to launch them.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Why would one care if the technology is old? Old and insecure was the issue raised by the grandparent. (And I suspect the implied part with old is "has newer alternatives which do not share its security problems".) > And I don't see how it is insecure by itself; that depends on the plugins themselves That the security depends on the plugins themselves is exactly what is insecure about it compared to more effectively sandboxed alternatives.

Koldark 11y ago

It might be. We use several apps that require Silverlight. I am sure Microsoft will update Silverlight in the future to work differently, but I can't do my work without Silverlight.

lectrick 11y ago
Silverlight should have never been. HTML5 tech is the way forward and has been for years now. The fact that all of these demos work at the speeds that they do is proof: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Porting-Examples-and-Demos https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Porting-Examples-...

criley2 11y ago

>Abandoning a 20 year old technology is really the final nail in the coffin for you Abandoning a useful technology with zero alternatives, telling the world to "simply get over using those previous functions and adjust to a new reality where you cannot do what you used to do" is the nail in the coffin for me. This is not a case of a legacy technology being dropped for which there are modern superior alternatives. This is a case where a core idea in web functionality has been rethought, and the powers that be have decided that we should not use web browsers in this way at all, and we will not be able to do so moving forward. And if we are given the ability back, it'll be a proprietary, non-standard, vendor hack solution that, in 20 years, will occupy the same space as NPAPI.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> This is not a case of a legacy technology being dropped for which there are modern superior alternatives. On the contrary, that's actually exactly the reason that all browser vendors are phasing out NPAPI (or, in MS's case with Spartan succeeding IE, ActiveX) plug-in technology: it is legacy technology for which there are modern superior alternatives.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]