Chrome's Deprecation of the NPAPI & FireBreath

Question

According to this statement, NPAPI is going to be destroyed (By Chrome)

Starting in January 2014, Chrome will block webpage-instantiated NPAPI plug-ins by default on the Stable channel.

My company has a plugin written in FireBreath (using C++) which I don't really know that much about, but its main purpose is to expose the underlying printer hardware. But that is beside the point.

The FireBreath website says

A plugin built on FireBreath works as an NPAPI plugin or as an ActiveX control (windows only) and support could be added for other plugin types built in C++ as well.

My questions

Is it safe to assume that come January 2014 that the plugin written with FireBreath will no longer work in the Chrome browser? If true, is there another cross-browser option I could use to expose the underlying printer hardware?

Answer 1

Any existing Firebreath plugin uses NPAPI, and will thus be blocked by default. This isn't the same as not working at all, which will come later; see my answer to this question.

The links in the comments above are probably the best resource for discussions of future options for a cross-browser framework to do what you want. However, before you can reasonably figure out what the best replacement technology for your case is, you'd need to know more about what the plugin does, because there's no one-size-fits-all replacement for all of NPAPI (by design).