NPAPI And The Hot-Pluggable World Wide Web

January 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

In today’s Chromed-up world it can be hard to remember an era where browsers could be extended with not just extensions, but also with plugins. Although for those of us who use traditional Netscape-based browsers like Pale Moon the use of plugins has never gone away, for the rest of the WWW’s users their choice has been limited to increasingly more restrictive browser extensions, with Google’s Manifest V3 taking the cake.

Although most browsers stopped supporting plugins due to “security concerns”, this did nothing to address the need for executing code in the browser faster than the sedate snail’s pace possible with JavaScript, or the convenience of not having to port native code to JavaScript in the first place. This led to various approaches that ultimately have culminated in the WebAssembly (WASM) standard, which comes with its own set of issues and security criticisms.

Other than Netscape’s Plugin API (NPAPI) being great for making even 1990s browsers ready for 2026, there are also very practical reasons why WASM and JavaScript-based approaches simply cannot do certain basic things.

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Hackaday Links: November 30, 2014

November 30, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

Tired of wiring up the power rails and serial adapter every time you build something on a breadboard? [Jason] has you covered. He put his Breadboard Buddy Pro up on Indiegogo, and it does everything you’d expect it to: power rails, USB to UART bridge, and a 3.3 V regulator. Oh, he’s not using an FTDI chip. Neat.

With Christmas around the corner, a lot of those cheap 3-channel RC helicopters are going to find their way into stockings. They’re cool toys, but if you want to really have fun with them, you’ll need to add a penny.

Here’s a crowdfunding campaign for a very interesting IoT module. It’s a UART to WiFi adapter that has enough free Flash and RAM to run your own code, GPIOs, SPI, and PWM functions. Wait a second. This is just an ESP8266 module. Stay classy, Indiegogo.

Mankind has sent space probes to the surface – and received pictures from – Venus, Mars, the Moon, Titan, asteroids Itokawa and Eros, and comet Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. In a beautiful bit of geological irony, every single one of these celestial bodies looks like a rock quarry in Wales. That quarry is now for sale.

Here’s something exceptionally interesting. It’s a browser plugin that takes a BOM, and puts all the components into a cart. Here’s the cool bit: it does it with multiple retailers. The current retailers supported are Mouser, Digikey, Farnell/Element14, Newark, and RS Components.

Want a death ray? Too bad, because it’s already been sold.

The Hackaday Antiduino Browser Plugin

August 18, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 134 Comments

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Hackaday – and the projects featured on Hackaday – get a lot of flak in the comments section simply for mentioning an Arduino. The Arduino complainers are, of course, completely wrong; everyone here is trying to make something, not make something in the most obscure possible way.

The Arduino is a legitimate tool, but still there are those among us who despise anything ending in ~duino. This browser plugin is for them. It’s a Chrome extension that selectively replaces or removes Arduino content from Hackaday depending on the user’s preference.

There are three settings to the plugin: See No Evil replaces images of Arduinos with serious business. Hear No Evil removes all occurrences of the word ‘Arduino’ and replaces them with something of your choosing. Speak No Evil removes all posts in the Arduino Hacks category.The last option also removes the ability to comment on any post in the Arduino Hacks category, so obviously the quality of the comments here will drastically increase by tomorrow.

You can grab the plugin on the gits. It’s Chrome only, but if someone wants to port it to Firefox, we’ll gladly put up another post.

There you go, Internet. You’re free now, and the biggest problem in your life has now been solved. Go give [SickSad] a virtual pat on the back, or tell him he could have done the same thing with a 555. Either of those are pretty much the same thing at this point.