Web app and USB communication without using NPAPI plugin

Question

I have NPAPI browser plugin for Chrome,Firefox for a USB device. This plugin allows silver light web application to communicate with the USB device.

Interaction involve
1.data transfer
2.querying USB device for info
3. and saving data in to USB device.
Recently Chrome announced that it is not gonna support the NPAPI plugin in future.

I have found PPAPI support will be there in chrome but it is not a standard and it will not work on firefox and other browser.Is there other way to achieve without using plugin. Do we have any other solution for this issue?

Answer 1

For Chrome, Native Messaging from an extension (also linked from the blog post you referenced) is likely the best replacement.

As for it being "non standard", in general you probably shouldn't expect anything that's not part of the actual web platform itself to be standard across browsers. (Note that NPAPI isn't really a standard in the formal web sense, and in practice it wasn't standard in the sense of being ubiquitous given that IE has never supported it, and Windows 8 Metro browsers, Chrome OS, all browsers on iOS, and Chrome on Android don't support it either.)

Answer 2

For Firefox, using js-ctypes from an extension should work for you. Alternatively you could look into mechanisms for communicating with a native application that works cross-browser (e.g. WebSockets? The FireBreath developer mailing list has some recent discussions on this).