Mozilla promises to drop NPAPI plugins for Firefox by the end of 2016

By the end of 2016, Mozilla will cut off support for Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plugins.

Mozilla says it’s due to many of the services offered via NPAPI — like streaming video and clipboard access — are available as native Web APIs. In addition to ease and performance, Mozilla says NPAPI presents security risks:

As browsers and the Web have grown, NPAPI has shown its age. Plugins are a source of performance problems, crashes, and security incidents for Web users.

Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have already dropped support for NPAPI plugins, so Mozilla is playing a bit of catch-up here. For those of you who want Flash to die, no luck this time — Mozilla says it will still support Flash for Firefox ”as an exception to the general plugin policy.”

➤ NPAPI Plugins in Firefox [Mozilla]