This has been a hot item with me, personally. If you use any web-based applications ranging from the browser plugin for Battlefield 4 to the vSphere Client Integration plugin then you’ve probably seen the “This plugin will soon be unsupported” messages. Chrome and Firefox have been indicating they’re dropping NPAPI support for a while but they didn’t release a version number or date. This is a minor inconvenience for people who use their computer for leisure but when your job involves web-based plugins it’s kind of important to know when support is dropped officially. As I found out, Chrome 45 dropped NPAPI support and Chrome by default auto-upgrades – sigh.

So – who do I blame? Everyone. I know that sounds silly but I am serious – I am a consumer of the product(s) so I feel that as a paying customer VMware is required to make sure that I can use the product in its fullest. At the same time I blame Chrome and Firefox for being so vague as to when support is ending. Anyway, with that out of the way I’ve found out how to install a previous version of Chrome and disable auto-updates but finally there’s an official fix.

Installing this latest vSphere CIP package allows the use of Chrome v45+ since it doesn’t require NPAPI! Awesome! The plugin is available from VMware here. They’ve also posted KB213062 titled “After updating Google Chrome to Version 45 or later the vSphere Web Client Integration Plugin 6.x no longer functions”. I’ve confirmed the fix works:

And here you can see that the check box for SSO works in vSphere:

Additionally, I can finally upload ISO’s/etc. to datastores from the web client which was missing without the plugin.

Thanks to VMware for finally fixing this and William Lam for posting it to his blog!

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

