Changes

[[wikipedia:NPAPI|NPAPI/PPAPI]] , in case you don't remember, is an obsolete browser plugin system for that was used by a bunch of different in-browser software platforms that tried to co-exist in the earlier days of the Internet, before basically only being used existing for the sake of Flash Player once Flash the SWF format became properly dominantand pushed everything else out of the HTTP ecosystem. By the mid-2010s, the plugin system was increasingly being seen as an ancient relic that modern browsers would be better off without; and so, while Adobe was phasing out Flash Player in late 2020, NPAPI was gradually being dropped by all the major browser vendors. It hasn't entirely disappeared (some smaller browser devs still maintain NPAPI in their own forks of stuff like Firefox and Chromium), but it is ''mostly'' dead nowadays.

You may also notice that a lot of older Flash player projects specifically fizzled out around 2009-2010. That's in huge part One likely reason for that is because , before then, many video multimedia hosting sites actually needed some type of SWF element to be able play videos audio and/or video in a browser, and the . The development of open-source alternatives was motivated by people not wanting an increasingly large part of the Internet to hinge on a single proprietary software platform, along with Macromedia/Adobe not necessarily seeing Linux support as a top priority. It wasn't until the start of 2010 that YouTube in particular started pushing really hard for HTML5 media elements, which have since become a standard feature in modern browsers and single-handedly made Flash Player completely redundant for multimedia playback.

:The proprietary reference player, which Adobe stopped directly supporting at the end of 2020. The plugin version has basically been delisted from Adobe's website and also has a built-in kill-switch that was flipped in January 2021, so it's probably not much use even in browsers that still support NPAPI. However, the discontinued desktop player version is still available for download from the debug downloads section of Adobe's website, and Harman International is also [https://airsdk.harman.com/flashplayer maintaining an extended support version specifically for enterprise users].