Google on Monday gave traditional Google plug-ins a stay of execution and instead outlined a three-step plan that will finalize their demise in 10 months.

The delay was the latest move in a year-long plan by Google to ban plug-ins built to a decades-old standard, a decision it has pitched as a security enhancement.

NPAPI (Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface) is the plug-in standard that harks back to Netscape, the 1990s browser that Microsoft buried in its antitrust-triggering battle over the browser market. NPAPI has long been the most popular plug-in standard, and is still supported by Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox and Opera Software’s Opera. (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) has always relied on its own proprietary ActiveX architecture.)

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