Google drops NPAPI apps and extensions from its Chrome Web Store

Last year, Google announced that it was working towards dropping Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) support from Chrome before the close of 2014. Today, the company took steps towards keeping its word by removing Chrome Web Store apps and extensions that use the aging cross-platform plugin. Not stopping there, this grand purge also applies to search results and category pages.

In a recent blog post by Google’s plug-in retirement planner, Justin Schuh, the programmer noted that Mountain View has seen an overall 12.9 percent decrease per user instantiations of NPAPI plug-ins, along with a decline of the platform’s most popular plug-ins. Not expecting much of an impact, Google claims that most use cases that rely on NPAPI have been moved to JavaScript-based open web technologies. The company believes that this change will help increase Chrome’s security, speed and stability, something the it’s aggressively working on improving.