Monday 20 April 2015

Chrome ends support for NAPI (SharePoint 2013 plugin)

Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) is a cross-platform plugin architecture. SharePoint 2013 makes use of this API for a plugin for Chrome and Firefox that provides functionality such as allowing documents to be opened in the local application (such as editing Word documents in Word).

Google has slowly been phasing out support for NPAPI plugins in Chrome, but as is so often the case, you don’t notice these things until they are switched off.
The current version of Chrome (42) disables NPAPI plugins by default and in the future they will not be supported at all.


For now you can enable NPAPI by going to chrome://flags/#enable-npapi in Chrome and clicking enable. After restarting the browser, the plugin should work again but this is not a long term solution as this option will eventually be removed. It would appear that unless Microsoft can provide a plugin that doesn’t depend on NPAPI, Chrome won’t be able to provide the best experience for SharePoint 2013.