Applet support in Chrome and Firefox

Hi there,

We have seen that support for NPAPI objects in Chrome and Firefox will be withdrawn a the the end of this year, I assume this will not effect the Chemaxon applets? 

 

Are you aware  of withdrawal of support for Chemaxon Applets in Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer in the near future and if so are you aware of the date when this is likely to occur?

Thanks,

Megan

 

 

Hi Megan,

yes we are aware of this information, but unfortunately we can not do much about that regarding Marvin Applets.

Google Chrome will drop the support of NPAPI which is used by Java Applets, on Linux platform this has happend in mid may this year already, and on other platforms they are planning to drop NPAPI support in Q2 2015.

As far as I can tell (and I googled a lot in this topic), Firefox changed the NPAPI plugins handling, and for a while the user has to enable the running of such a plugin in a pop-up, when a site tries to start one, but they are not planning to drop the NPAPI support completely as Chrome does.

According to Internet Explorer as far as I know, it does not support NPAPI for ages. In Internet Explorer Java is running as an ActiveX control, and they do not plan to retire ActiveX this far.

Why we can not really do much about the retirement of the plugin? It is out of our scope, if the browser does not support Java anymore, either Oracle, or the Browser vendor should do something about it. There are rumors of a possible replacement of NPAPI based Java plugin with a PPAPI (used by for example Flash), but I could not find anything about this that is reliable enough, and also it seems a bit unrealistic for some professionals in this area, so most probably after Chrome removes NPAPI Java applets will not work in Chrome anymore.

What we could do about this issue, to develop  Marvin JS, which is currently suitable as a replacement for most of our users, and we are actively developing it for the web even for Academic teaching and examination purposes as well as query structure sketching.

I hope this helps to understand our point of view on this issue, if you have further questions, suggestions or information, they are welcome, and we are happy to discuss them on this question.

Regards,
Istvan 

Hi there

Our worry is replacing Marvie view  in javascript.  We display a structure of  a compound in our entries.  Currently the user can rotate it change the display options, copy and edit it in the viewer.  We don't want to remove functionality by replacing it with an image.  Maybe a toolbar option on Marvin JS would work, if all editing options did not appear but all the view and copy and paste options only were available.  Is this going to be available as a set up option at any point in the near future?

 

Thanks

Megan

Hi Megan,

I understand your concerns. We plan to make the tool bars customizable in the near future in Marvin JS. Besides, we are considering to develop a separate JS Viewer in the future if we can see enough business interest on it.

Best regards,

Efi 

We would also be very interested in a JS version of MarvinView. What we do currently is generate an image URL and display it, but provide a link where the user can switch from the image to MarvinView. Obviously, if Java is no longer going to be supported, then the MarvinView link will become inactive.

I can imagine a clunky workaround where some buttons for rotating, etc. could be provided, and one could use AJAX to call JChem methods that would convert the structure, then send the new image back to the GUI; but obviously, this workaround is not desirable.

Hi,

Recently Chrome has disabled Java (more specifically NPAPI) for me after some upgrade.

It is still possible to enable it manually by entering this URL, clicking on "Enable" and then clicking on "Relaunch" at the bottom: 

chrome://flags/#enable-npapi

Szilard