Max Heinritz announced on the developer mailing lists of Chromium that the browser will no longer support plug-ins that use NPAPI as soon as version 34 is released, which will happen in April. The idea was to stop supporting them until the end of 2014 but they have decided to go ahead because they will not implement support for NPAPI in linux-aura.
Due to this, many plug-ins that make use of NPAPI will stop working, including among them Adobe Flash, as well as other multimedia plug-ins used in Linux, such as the Totem plug-in.
The withdrawal of Flash support will deal a serious blow to users of the free version of Chrome since unfortunately there are still many things on the web that depend on the Adobe plug-in. This without detracting from other NPAPI-dependent plug-ins.
This is not to say, however, that Chromium users will be without Flash forever as they will always be able to use the version of the Adobe plug-in that makes use of PPAPI. This version of Flash is included in the Chrome package for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, however, it does not have a separate installer.
Thus, Chromium users have two options:
- Switch to Chrome
- Install and use the version of Flash that uses PPAPI (Pepper Flash)
This last option can be achieved in different ways, either by manually extracting Flash from a Google Chrome package or via an extra repository.
More information - More about Chromium at Ubunlog, Mozilla bets heavily on Shumway in Firefox
Source - Mailing lists
Chromium is not to be called a mass browser, and with this twist it is not going to gain more users. Be careful, the decision seems coherent to me, but not necessary.