Chrome Will Start Blocking All Remaining NPAPI Plugins In January

Starting in January 2015, Google’s Chrome browser will block all old-school Netscape Plug-In API (NPAPI) plugins. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, given that Google started its efforts to remove NPAPI plugins more than a year ago.

Over the last year, Google went from recommending that developers move away from this old architecture to actively blocking almost all NPAPI plugins. There was, however, always a whitelist that allowed some of the most popular NPAPI plugins like Microsoft’s Silverlight, Unity and Google’s own Google Earth plugin to continue to run in the browser. Starting in January, even that’s going away and all of these plugins will be blocked by default.

Other plugins that will be affected by this move include the Google Talk and Facebook plugins. Most of the whitelisted plugins saw their usage decline since Chrome started the deprecation program, but according to Google’s own data, Silverlight still remains popular with 11% of Chrome users launching it at least once per month. Most of that usage is probably from Netflix users, but now that Netflix is slowly moving away from Silverlight, too, the impact will likely be less than those numbers suggest.

Enterprises, which may still run some mission-critical NPAPI plugins, will be able to bypass these restrictions for the time being. Come September 2015, however, Google will completely remove support for these plugins from Chrome.

Source:Techcrunch 

Porn Consumption Goes Mobile, Apple has the Lion's Share: Report

More than half the people who view porn are watching it using mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, and most of these mobile users are accessing their porn using Apple's Safari browser.

According to leading adult entertainment website, Pornhub, there is a major shift in consumption, and in a report titled Pornhub Battle of the Browsers, it reveals that while visitors using PCs remain a significant percentage, more than half of the 38 million daily visitors are using smartphones or tablets.

On smartphones, Safari is the most commonly used browser, though this could also be a sign of Android users being split across different browsers. According to Pornhub, Safari accounts for 38.2 percent of its mobile browser-based traffic and the default Android browser accounts for 29.4 percent, but Chrome is at 18 percent, while Internet Explorer is at 2.4 percent. Rounding out the top five is Opera Mini, at 2.3 percent.

Internet Explorer, Safari and the Android browser are exclusive to their respective platforms, but others like Chrome and Opera Mini are multiplatform.

On tablets, the difference is more marked - Safari accounts for a whopping 73 percent, while Chrome was 13.6 percent of the audience, followed by the Android browser at 7.8 percent, and Amazon Silk at 4.8 percent. BlackBerry rounds off the top five for tablets, accounting for 0.69 percent of viewers. Of course, this is also might just be a reflection of the overall tablet sales - iPad users are not necessarily more interested in porn, just more in number.

On the desktop though, Chrome is by far the most popular option, accounting for 44.4 percent of all Pornhub views, followed by Internet Explorer, at 23.2 percent, and Firefox at 20 percent. Safari and Opera follow, at 7 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively