Dear Berto,
Thanks a lot for you reply and provided information. For now we are
going to apt-mark hold the libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev package. So we can stay
on the plugin-enabled version for the remaining life cycle of Debian 10.
We might download the latest version and build it to enable plugin if we
find it's very needed. We will also keep a copy of the source of v2.30.5
just in case we cannot make the latest version work.
Actually during these few days, we have found a quite suitable
alternative to the WebKit/Plugin architecture. It's called NWJS/NAPI. We
find it can almost fully fulfill our needs and also quite easy to
migrate to. The only drawback is, we cannot host the our application
from network, everything must be at the local machine. Though this
doesn't bring much negative impact to us.
Therefore, we can still keep on using WebKit/Plugin for some time. I
will look into your web extension suggestion too.
I thank you and appreciate your kind concern and help.
Regards
Ben
On 19/1/2021 12:14 am, Alberto Garcia wrote:
On Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 09:11:14AM +0800, Ben Chin, KB wrote:
Dear Alerto,
Thanks for your notification. I am sad to hear that the plugin
support will be removed.
The plugin is our company's in house program to provide a way to
communicate between C/C++ and JavaScript, makes it possible for the
connected primitive hardware to play some roles in the evolving
Internet world.
We don't use the full features of NPAPI, but just the
calling/passing functions and information between the browser and
the underneath lower level system/hardware resources.
If removing of the plugin is inevitable, we will need to find an
alternative of WebKit to fulfill our goal.
Hi Ben, and sorry for the late reply.
There's going to be a new release (2.30.5) one of these days with the
plugin process installed again, but the next stable branch (2.32.x)
won't support NPAPI plugins.
All major web browsers have removed support for these plugins, perhaps
you could use a Web Extension?
https://blogs.igalia.com/carlosgc/2013/09/10/webkit2gtk-web-process-extensions/
Would it be possible to keep an older version of the plugin enabled
WebKit? Like, the new WebKit would be version 3, and let the old
one survive as WebKit 2 and stay as it is?
You can always keep the latest version that supports plugins
installed. If what you're asking is "Can we keep that package
officially in Debian together with the newer versions?" then I'm
afraid that this is too much of a maintenance burden for this feature.
But you can do that locally, i.e., modify and rebuild the package so
it is co-installable with other versions of webkit. I can maybe help
you if you have problems with that.
Berto
