Chrome removes support for Java and Silverlight plugins

Google's Chrome browser no longer supports NPAPI plugins including Java, Unity and Silverlight. Support for the plugins has been removed in version 45 of the browser which was released last Monday.

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Earlier this year Google announced it would remove support for NPAPI and the company disabled support in Chrome in April. Since Chrome 44 the NPAPI plugins were disabled by default and could only be activated through a special setting. From Chrome 45 it's no longer possible to activate Java, Unity and Silverlight in any way.

NPAPI originates from the Netscape browser and has now been replaced by either HTML5 or PPAPI, the latter is also how the Adobe Flash plugin is implemented in modern browsers.

Not every browser developer is convinced NPAPI should no longer be supported, we reported earlier that the release of a stable version of a 64-bit Firefox has been delayed due to issues with NPAPI support.

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Also Opera still supports NPAPI but because the browser uses the same Blink render engine as Chrome, it's likely that browser will soon also no longer support Java, Unity and Silverlight plugins. Also Internet Explorer still supports NPAPI, but its successor Edge doesn't.

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