The latest updates from the main browsers have many new features to improve the user experience. However, one of them could affect it in certain ways such as the disabling of NPAPI plugins . This means that all websites developed in Java, Silverlight and ShockWave will stop working correctly, causing several of their functions to be truncated or limited.
These types of plugins are widely used in online gaming websites , where they are necessary for users to access various features that allow the game to remain on the platform without downloading. Although the decision was made with the main objective of improving user security after certain vulnerabilities related to these add-ons that could affect the user’s experience when browsing were detected, it was not Very well received. That regardless of the fact that many times these add-ons made pages load unnecessary resources, slowing down the operation of the browser .
However, in many cases they are completely necessary , so we will show you how to re-enable them in each browser so you can enjoy the benefits that they can bring to your browsing experience . You will learn how to do it step by step in the main browsers available today.
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Enabling NPAPI plugins can be very easy depending on the browser you own and mainly the version of it. In the most current versions of these browsers these types of plugins are completely discarded , so you should play a bit with their code to reactivate them.
In Google Chrome
Google Chrome was the first to remove NPAPIs from your browser in 2015 . For Chrome version 45, these were completely eradicated, so to reactivate it you must literally do magic with its source code . So stop these again, you will need to install on your computer a version lower than this, which can be any version lower than this. That said, the steps to follow are as follows:
- The first thing you should do is make sure to have Google Chrome in version 44 or lower than this .
- Once, after confirming the above, you must resort to Experimental browser functions to re-enable NPAPI. This is achieved by entering chrome: // flags in the navigation bar.
- This will direct you to a page with a wide list of options where you must place “ Enable NPAPI ”.
- Once this section is found, select the option“ Enable ”, restart the browser and voila, you can use the NPAPI functions in Chrome again .
Currently the new version of Chrome doesn’t support these plugins anymore, so you won’t be able to activate them in this way unless you have an outdated version of your browser. This will force developers to use other technologies such as HTML5 or similar so that its operation is suitable again.
In Mozilla Firefox
Firefox has taken longer to completely eradicate the NPAPIs from your browser . At the beginning of 2017 it was when they decided to make this decision, so you can still use an outdated version of this program to use them freely without any restrictions.
However, it is possible to continue using NPAPI plugins in the Firefox browser as long as you use only version 51 in ESR mode of it . This is the only way to enable them and therefore we will teach you to do it in simple steps:
This is a valid alternative today, but sooner or later this type of add-ons will completely disappear. In fact, for the most current versions of the browser, it is impossible to do this kind of tricks, so if you want to continue using them, you will have to install versions lower than Firefox 52 .
In Internet Explorer (Edge)
In EDGE, Windows 10 Explorer, it is impossible to have these add-ons available . For more than three years they stopped supporting this type of plugins and there is no possible way to use them again in this browser.
Unfortunately, these plugins are very discontinued and current browsers have completely blocked them . However, there are other programming technologies that work very well so that websites can play multimedia content on their interfaces, so it is only a matter of time for all to adapt to them.