How can I enable Silverlight in Google Chrome 42+?
In September 2013, Google announced its decision to move away from support for NPAPI (the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface). In Chrome 42 NPAPI is disabled by default, disallowing plugins like Silverlight and Java. Threat Report explains, "NPAPI’s 90s-era architecture has become a leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity."
There are other APIs that companies like Microsoft and Oracle can use to modernize their web-plugins and one can expect them to be updated to support these alternative options, but for now, as per this article from Microsoft Microsoft Silverlight may not work in recent versions of Google Chrome, you'll need to do the following:
- Paste this into chrome
chrome://flags/#enable-npapi - Select Enable
- When using the site, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, etc... you need to right click the content and click Run this Plugin
- (optional) laugh at Chrome for underestimating superuser
Great answer above, utilizing the override option in Chrome Flags. However, this will only work until September 2015
See Chromium Blog they write as follows;
In September 2015 we will remove the override and NPAPI support will be permanently removed from Chrome. Installed extensions that require NPAPI plugins will no longer be able to load those plugins.
With Chrome 43 I find that using the enable-npapi flag no longer helps to enable NPAPI plugins.
While the flag remains in the chrome:// settings for version 43, and despite Google saying that from "Chrome version 45, you’ll need to use an alternate web browser to load content that requires a NPAPI plugin"1, it seems the move has already taken effect.
1: NPAPI plugins don't work on Chrome version 42 and higher