How to re-enable Java plugin on Google Chrome 42 on Windows

Question

As stated in NPAPI deprecation: developer guide:

In April 2015 (Chrome 42) NPAPI support will be disabled by default in Chrome and we will unpublish extensions requiring NPAPI plugins from the Chrome Web Store. All NPAPI plugins will appear as if they are not installed, as they will not appear in the navigator.plugins list nor will they be instantiated (even as a placeholder). Although plugin vendors are working hard to move to alternate technologies, a small number of users still rely on plugins that haven’t completed the transition yet. We will provide an override for advanced users (via chrome://flags/#enable-npapi) and enterprises (via Enterprise Policy) to temporarily re-enable NPAPI (via the page action UI) while they wait for mission-critical plugins to make the transition. In addition, setting any of the plugin Enterprise policies (e.g. EnabledPlugins, PluginsAllowedForUrls) will temporarily re-enable NPAPI.

So, April came and Google Chrome disabled NPAPI plugins, including Java.

How to re-enable them on Windows machines?

Solution

NOTE

Java no longer works in Chrome. None of the previous techniques/hacks (see revision) will work.

Comments

[Admin]

@Ramhound, The other question if focused on Mac OS X. Could you review the duplication?

[Admin]

Not a duplicate. That question asks why Java was disabled. This asks how to enable it anyway.

[Eugene Marin]

None of these work with Chrome 46 anymore... What now?

[motobói]

Sadly, there is no alternative yet. As a enterprise user, I'll have to change browsers to use some company applications.

[kmiklas]

Run Chromium 41, which has out-of-the-box NPAPI support, with no enable/disable flag. See this post: superuser.com/questions/988243/…

[motobói]

@kmiklas One should absolutely not use an old version of chrome, as it contain a lot of security breaches already addressed on newer versions. A lot of these security breaches don't rely on the user downloading anything. They can infect your computer by just browsing to a page.

[kmiklas]

@motobói yes, I know... we all know. Given the choice, we would have it another way. Unfortunately there are legacy applications out there which require NPAPI, so we don't have much choice in the matter.