Chrome and the endless Client Integration plug-in install prompt!

I think we can all agree that ol’ Al Einstein was a pretty smart dude right?  Especially when it came to his thoughts around insanity and the “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” spiel.  The thing is Al’s not here anymore and while yeah, he was a wise one, he never had to install the vSphere Client Integration plug-in inside of the newest version of Google Chrome – if he did, he’d certainly place himself inside of his own definition!

So here’s the issue at hand – One fine July morning I find myself sitting in front of the same message shown above!  “How odd…” I thought, “I could’ve swore I’ve already installed this!”  Either way it’s not a big deal, I’ll just install it again!  So, shutdown the 84 tabs inside of Chrome that I have open and away we go – next, next, next my way through the wizard, re-open my 84 tabs and…

Huh?!?  Now I know that I’ve installed this!  Maybe it’s just not enabled!  So I check out plugins section within Chrome to see that…

Wow!  It’s not even listed anymore!  Now I know it used to be there as I can remember going in and ensuring that it was always allowed to run.  After another failed attempt at installing it with the same result I do what I always do – Google!  And to my surprise end up at this KB.

To the point!

To skip my little story and get to the point the problem resides with NPAPI – an architecture used to extend browser functionality.  Google says the 90’s era architecture is outdated and causes crashes and therefore, as of Google Chrome 42 – not enabled!  That same 90’s era architecture is the delivery model within the vSphere Client Integration plug-in – so you can see where the problem now lies!

To make a long problem short all we need to do in order to get the plug-in to run is simply enable NPAPI within Chrome, which is done by entering “chrome://flags/#enable-npapi” in the address bar and simply clicking ‘Enable’.

This will get us through….for now!  Who knows when Google may decide to phase support for this out completely?  They are on their own schedule and it wouldn’t surprise me to see them just drop support sometime in the near future!  I mean, it does stand for the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface, which to me sounds just a little archaic 🙂

In the meantime we will have to put up with a nifty little warning every time we fire up the vSphere Web Client – because, who doesn’t want to close two warnings every morning?!?!  Either way it’s working now, I tried something different and got different results!  My man Al would be proud!