Dave's Redistricting App Screwed? (UPDATE: New DRA Link, v2.5)

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

It looks like the problem is that DRA uses Silverlight and that Silverlight uses the old NPAPI plug in interface which Google has chosen to discontinue support for as they content it causes a variety of problems.  http://blog.chromium.org/2014/11/the-final-countdown-for-npapi.html The latest update to Chrome disabled the support by default tho for now you can still reenable it by manually reenabling it.  However, their plan is that in September they'll totally remove support for it.  Since Microsoft has also announced that they intend to end all support for Silverlight by 2021 and that current support is limited to patching the existing code, I doubt they'll be working on getting it to run on Chrome.  After all, it was no secret that Google was planning on discarding the NPAPI.

In short, until DRA is rewritten to use something other than Silverlight, it won't be working on Chrome.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I still don't get why there is a newer version with less functionality, while version 2.2 still continues to work.

Basically, 2.2 depends upon another piece of software that is no longer being maintained, not even for emergency fixes. So if something causes that to break, 2.2 will be dead with no chance of revival.  2.5 doesn't have that dependency, so it is more robust, but at the cost of less ability. Ideally, we'll eventually get a DRA 3.0 that doesn't use Silverlight at all, but I can understand why that's unlikely to happen until we have 2020 census data to play with.