Comment 4 for bug 1321505

@eric-nemchik: No problem.

During the last months we tried out several approaches how to make it possible to continue providing Pipelight, and I'll summarize the results below.

* Our first approach was also the idea to add some additional wrapper on top of the existing Pipelight code, to make it possible to load the plugin as PPAPI. To be a bit more precise, there is not only PPAPI, there is NaCl and PPAPI. Both are basically the same plugin interface, but NaCl is highly sandboxed. Since Pipelight depends on the communication to external processes, we cannot use a sandboxed plugin interface. Concerning PPAPI: There is already a working prototype, but:

- There is no way to "install" PPAPI plugins. You either have to pass a very long command line or even to recompile Chromium
- By default PPAPI plugins are still executed in a sandbox, which has to be disabled for the whole browser to get it working
- PPAPI uses a different Cross-Origin policy handling than NPAPI, which could result in a lot of new plugin errors, where we cannot do anything to fix them
- no embedding of the plugin window into the browser
- ...

Thats why we also started a second approach:

* Providing some patches for Chromium to add back minimal NPAPI support. They are written by Michael Müller and linked in the bug report above. Even though embedding is still not supported (because its not implemented/possible by their new rendering engine anymore), it seems to be the much cleaner approach.

Regards,
Sebastian