PPAPI support for Chrome

[ghost]

Google has discontinued NPAPI support, WebPG is not working on latest Chrome browser in our Linux boxes.
Are you planning to implement PPAPI for Chrome compatibility?
thanks in advance

[kylehuff]

While PPAPI would be the desired route, as I understand it, PPAPI (without Native Client - "NaCl") is not a viable option. My understanding is that PPAPI plugins (without NaCl) have no mechanism in which to install them. The issue with providing a PPAPI plugin with NaCl is the very restrictive sandbox (no fork, exec, etc.) and lack of ability to call, pipe or otherwise interact with an external binary/library (no way to communicate with GnuPG). If the above statements are ill-informed, I would love to hear about.

In the meantime, I have reluctantly changed the architecture in order to support "Native Messaging", which is a "messaging host" (binary) that is registered within chrome via a manifest (and registry key in windows), and communicates via STDIN/STDOUT.

The project kylehuff/libwebpg is actually used by webpg-npapi, and it provides the abstracted GnuPG methods, and webpg-npapi provides the NPAPI portion. kylehuff/libwebpg can be compiled as either a binary or library, which provides support for both Native Messaging (binary) and Mozilla's JS-CTYPES (library).

I plan to actually publish this information in the libwebpg wiki, however I have been left scrambling to react to the fact that Native Messaging has no in-built mechanism to install or bundle the "host" into the host operating system; that would require an external, out-of-band installer (which has crippled one of my projects that uses used webpg-npapi in chrome).

Some information about native messaging can be found here: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/messaging#native-messaging

And my arguments/disdain regarding the Native Messaging implementation has been noted here: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=321628#c26

I should note, kylehuff/libwebpg is currently under heavy testing, and I have a few hundred lines of changes that are pending (not yet committed). I hope to have the improvements/fixes pushed out this weekend.

[kylehuff]

Apparently the markdown was not working all that great, by kylehuff/libwebpg I mean https://github.com/kylehuff/libwebpg