> Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2?

Yes and that's a good thing

> Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5?

It's true that what NPAPI was used for 99% of the time is better served by HTML5. But it's not like NPAPI was limited to Flash and applets. Afair NPAPI plugins can access all native resources (which is the reason why the security sucked so much), HTML5 obviously can't. E. g. runtime code generation isn't particularly usable in WASM, so no JIT other than browser JIT for you. Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed. Not that they didn't have good reasons to do so, but having a native-exposing plugin system (with some friction, don't just install anything with a click) would have covered most of the use cases without being that much of a privacy problem.

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PurpleRamen 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed.

Ah, true, Chrome has it, but Firefox not. Coincidental, some weeks ago I had to use this, worked well, and is another reason to always have an alternative browser around. Yes, Mozilla should work to at least fix that stuff.

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tliltocatl 4 hours ago | parent [-]

AFAIR Mozilla is firmly against introducing new stuff that could be used for fingerprinting and that was their (and Apple's) rationale for not implementing it. That's a noble goal for sure, but peripheral access is a genuinely useful feature now that the Web had become the de-facto standard application platform. You don't like JS having access to everything - fine, but than we need some other way to do this (without porting everything to native).

	▲	ryandrake an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> now that the Web had become the de-facto standard application platform. I feel like we can continue to resist this, although I admit it's getting more and more futile every year. It's like trying to hold back the tide. I personally don't want the web to be an application platform. The web is for browsing web pages. I have an application platform on my computer already.