AUSKey breaks on Firefox after old technology disabled

Since the Mozilla Foundation released version 52 at the beginning of the month, there have been complaints about the Australian Taxation Office’s AUSKey software no longer working. The reason for this is that Mozilla killed off support for old style plugins (known as Netscape Plugin API or NPAPI) plugins except for Adobe Flash Player in the new release.

You will be presented with a screen like this if you are still using Java for your AUSKey.

NPAPI plugins were developed to provide features for web browsers which weren’t provided by the browser itself. As the web has evolved and web standards enhanced to provide new features many of the features provided by plgins are now built into browsers themselves. NPAPI technology has been around for over 20 years and has been responsible for various browser vulnerabilities and stability issues. Moving on from them should make browsers more secure and result in fewer crashes.

Firefox is the last browser to drop support for old style plugins. Chrome dropped support for NPAPI plugins in 2015 and Microsoft didn’t build ActiveX (Microsoft’s alternative to NPAPI) into it’s Edge browser which comes with Windows 10.

While most websites have made the change, many still have not – with one of the most difficult being the Australian Taxation Office’s sites using AUSKey. The ATO has suggested users use Firefox with Java but the time has now come for Firefox to end support for the Java Plugin which will break AUSKey.

• There are three options:
  The first is to reenable NPAPI plugins other than Flash in Firefox itself. This can be done by typing about:config into the address bar and setting “plugin.load_flash_only” to false. This will only work until the release of Firefox 53.
• The second is to switch the the Extended Support Release of Firefox which will retain support for the plugins for another 12 months. This can be done by downloading it from this page. This is the best option if you have something other than AUSKey which requires Java.
• The third is to download the AUSKey plugin for Firefox from the ATO here. This is the best option if AUSKey enabled sites are the only sites you need Java for.