Is there any web browser with NPAPI plugins support?

Solution 1:

The Pale Moon web browser is an interesting option. In the document Pale Moon future roadmap they make this statement:

"Pale Moon supports NPAPI plug-ins. Unlike Firefox, we will not be deprecating or removing support for these kinds of plug-ins. This means that you will be able to continue using your media, authentication, and other plug-ins in Pale Moon like Flash, Silverlight, bank-authenticators or networking plug-ins for specific purposes."

Solution 2:

You can use the Extended Support Release of Firefox 52 as follows:

The following steps should work (tested on Mint 18 based on Ubuntu 16.04 and Mint 19 based on Ubuntu 18.04):

1. Download and extract the Firefox ESR install from here: Download Firefox Extended Support Release. Make sure it doesn't auto update by changing the update settings in preferences.
2. Launch Firefox and type about:config in the location bar
3. Accept the risks and then add a key (right click mouse -> New -> Boolean)
4. Call the key plugin.load_flash_only and set it to false
5. Add a Firefox extension for switching the user agent eg. User-Agent Switcher
6. Set the user agent to an earlier version of Firefox on Linux eg. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i586; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0
7. Close Firefox
8. Download the tar.gz JRE package for Linux from Java.com and store the file in the Downloads folder in your home folder (i.e. ~/Downloads). It will be of the form: jre-8u121-linux-i586.tar.gz for the 32 bit version. Choose the 32 bit or 64 bit version according to the version of Firefox ESR you downloaded.

9. Then do the following in a shell to extract the JRE (replacing with 64 bit versions if needed):

   sudo mkdir -p -v /opt/java/32
   cd ~/Downloads
   tar -zxvf jre-8u121-linux-i586.tar.gz
   sudo mv -v jre1.8.0_* /opt/java/32
   

10. Now the Java needs to be linked to Firefox. In a shell:

    mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/plugins/
    cd /opt/java/32/jre1.8.0_121
    ln -sf $PWD/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/
    

11. Launch Firefox and verify your Java version here: Verify Java Version

12. If it doesn't work and the wrong Java plugin appears to be loaded eg. IcedTea, then remove them:

    sudo apt-get remove icedtea-plugin icedtea-8-plugin icedtea-netx icedtea-netx-common