Interesting how they are deprecating one tech (NPAPI) in the name of open web, while at the same time they are pushing NaCl.
The only reference to the open web is
> Most use cases that previously required NPAPI are now supported by JavaScript-based open web technologies
while the reasoning given for deprecation is explicitly "security, speed, and stability", which is certainly true. NPAPI is bad, bad business, and wouldn't fly for a second today if it weren't grandfathered into browsers.
It's a shame that there's still the NaCl fallback, but I would give good odds this will end up a positive for everyone as a forcing function, since the remaining plugins will look to JS-based solutions first since they'll continue working in all browsers.
(now, unfortunately some of those will be turning to EME, but that's a different series of poor decisions)
Agreed, but as I said above, it's definitely not being called that in the blog post.
One might call it hairsplitting. But we really don't need another ActiveX in the browser. We are still recuperating from that one. And I'm not even saying NaCl is bad as ActiveX, nor am saying that ActiveX is bad from technology point of view. What I am saying is that both are/were technologies that were pushed by single browser vendor and that is bad.
EDIT: fixed typo
And NaCl isn't the only recourse for previously-NPAPI-based plugins. It's just the worst (for the web) choice. Better is to build the plugins on top of JS, which some vendors are already doing: for example, the announced future of the Unity on the web is compiling to JS.
Non-web-technologies (like the current iteration of NaCl) intruding on the browser is bad for the open web. But plugins are also bad for the open web, and deprecating them is better than not deprecating them. You can't fault the Chrome team too much for closing one door just because they left another open. :)
Agreed, but I still don't see a reasonable replacement for it. PPAPI and NaCl don't fit the bill, and even if they did, no one implements them but Chrome.
Chrome is the IE of the '10s.
A reasonable replacement for it is for browsers to just expose appropriate functionality through JS APIs with appropriate security provisions and continue to optimize their JS engines.
Which is happening.
https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-4.5#changes https://twitter.com/UnitZeroOne/status/471355979217793024
The pragma may be Firefox-only but nobody cares about that.
asm.js is nothing but a "hint" to the JS engine that some optimizations are possible.
IIRC, Chrome hasn't implemented support for the pragma because they believe they can get the majority of the benefits by making V8 smarter.
(P)NaCL is none of those things.
NaCl was not (afaik) adopted by any other browser vendor. Therefor it's not open web.