NPAPI removal means no DjVu documents in Firefox

DjVu documents used to be viewable within firefox using a very reliable NPAPI plugin. With the removal of the NPAPI support, this no longer works. 

Although there have been worthy attempts to use HTML5 technologies (e.g. https://github.com/mateusz-matela/djvu-html5) to view DjVu files, the Firefox JavaScript engine is far too slow to decode and render DjVu files in a manner that makes browsing agreeable. In fact, on a modern machine, the JS version is far slower than the NPAPI viewer ever was, even when it ran on a 1999 Pentium 90 machine.  

One cannot even say that the DjVu NPAPI plugin was flimsy. The Unix version was rock-solid, running out-of-process from inception, detecting and supporting the GLib loop and Xembed protocols. The Window was more traditional but also simple and rock-solid. While it is true that some aspects of NPAPI were obsolete, one could have modernized the API instead of simply eliminating the capability.

The decision to support Flash (and only Flash) is very shocking to me. You may argue that many more people are viewing Flash content than are browsing DjVu documents. But is that really the spirit of open-source software?  I thought the idea was to enable people instead of leveraging monopoly power to decide for them which technologies they can use or not. 

Anyway, I am very disappointed.

- Leon Bottou