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[[wikipedia:NPAPI|NPAPI]]—in case you don't remember—is an obsolete browser plugin system designed to allow for interactive web-page elements beyond what early versions of HTML could do on their own. While there were a bunch of different in-browser software platforms co-existing in the earlier days of the internet, NPAPI effectively existed only for the sake of SWF players once the format became properly dominant and pushed everything else out of the in-browser ecosystem. With the shrinking relevance of SWF in the late 2010s, the plugin system that the players relied on was increasingly seen as an ancient relic that modern browsers would be better off without. So, while Adobe was phasing out Flash Player in late 2020, and so NPAPI was also gradually started being dropped phased out by all the major browser vendorsin late 2020 (around the same time that Adobe was preparing to drop Flash Player itself). NaturallyNPAPI hasn't entirely gone away though, as some indie browser devs still maintain NPAPI it in their own forks of stuff like Firefox and Chromium, so it hasn't entirely gone awayand such.

:The proprietary reference player, which Adobe stopped directly supporting at the end of 2020 and has since fully delisted from their website. The plugin version 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, but the desktop player version is still usable if you download it from an archived version of the Adobe website.:Despite the hard discontinuation and a lack of support for user-friendly features such as URL spoofing, Flash Player still remains by far It's also worth noting that the most capable desktop player for Flash games as of mid-2023. If a Flash game is listed in [[Flashpoint]], it almost certainly uses Flash Player to run the SWF.hasn't been completely discontinued:While Adobe has dropped Flash Player, Harman International has continues to maintain [https://airsdk.harman.com/flashplayer an extended support version specifically ] intended for enterprise users]. There; and there's also a consumer-level Chinese version which is actively developed by a company called Zhongcheng, but although you shouldn't get it directly from them their official site (Flash [dot] cn) because it'll be full of bundled malware.:Despite the hard discontinuation and a lack of support for user-friendly features such as URL spoofing, Adobe's Flash Player still remains by far the most capable desktop player for Flash games as of mid-2023. This is why the [[Flashpoint]] preservation project still relies on Flash Player to run its SWF games.

:A C++ player specifically designed to provide drop-in FLOSS replacements for both the desktop and NPAPI versions of Flash Player. It claims to have 83% of the overall SWF spec covered as of August 2022, but development has been fairly slow ever since 2015, when it became a mostly one-person effortcirca 2015. Lightspark historically focused on more recent versions of the SWF spec that weren't supported by Gnash, hence why Lightspark could (and still can) use Gnash as an automatic fallback if both are installed simultaneously.