679446 - The "Check to see if your plugins are up to date" link at the top of the Add-ons Manager does not do anything.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Add-Ons: General, defect)

Description

[Marcel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.849.0 Safari/535.1

Steps to reproduce:

The "Check to see if your plugins are up to date" link at the top of the Add-ons Manager page does not do anything. The link highlights when moused over, so it appears to be recognized as a link, but when clicked there is no feedback and nothing seems to happen.

I have three extensions and a boatload of plugins listed as enabled.



Actual results:

Nothing.


Expected results:

Some sort of feedback as to whether the plugins are up to date or not should be presented to the user.

Comment 1

[Al]

I have same experience on Windows XP system - link does nothing

Comment 2

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

> Check to see if your plugins are up to date

I don't see this - is this the exact text you are seeing ?

Comment 3

[Marcel]

- Select Tools -> Add-ons
- Select "Plugins" from the left hand column

At the top of the page, right above the list of plugin icons, is a simple link with "Check to see if your plugins are to date" - exactly that text.

Comment 4

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy y'all,

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:6.0) Gecko/20110812 Thunderbird/6.0, Build ID 20110812055131

for completeness, this also happens with tb6 on win7. perhaps the platform should be set to "windows"?

take care,
lee

Comment 5

[heraldo]

From the error console in Tb6:

Error: formatURLPref: Couldn't get pref: plugins.update.url
Source file: jar:file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Thunderbird/omni.jar!/components/nsURLFormatter.js
Line: 145

Error: [Exception... "'<error>' when calling method: [nsIContentHandler::handleContent]"  nsresult: "0x805d0001 (<unknown>)"  location: "<unknown>"  data: no]

Comment 6

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Also confirmed on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0a1) Gecko/20110916 Thunderbird/9.0a1

Comment 7

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

I don't see this exact problem: instead, the plugin check opens in Firefox (on Linux nightly). Either way, the fix is pretty straightforward: overlay the about:addons page to override the openUrl function.

However, I'm not sure we want *all* links from about:addons to open inside Thunderbird. Standard8, do you have any opinions on this? For reference, here are the relevant calls: <http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/search?find=%2Fmozilla%2Ftoolkit%2Fmozapps%2Fextensions%2Fcontent%2F&string=openUrl>

One easy way to fix this would be to make my patch from bug 640627 a little more generic and overlay that onto about:addons. A quick test confirms that this would work, but it's only the right way if we want all of the links to be loaded in a content tab.

Comment 8

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Oops, it would help if I CC'ed the person I'm talking to. :)

Standard8, see comment 7.

Comment 9

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to Jim Porter (:squib) from comment #7)
> I don't see this exact problem:

That's because we've now landed bug 661410 on trunk which has provided the missing pref.

What would be good to do is backport just that pref to 8, so at least the link does something...

> instead, the plugin check opens in Firefox
> (on Linux nightly).

which isn't too bad, as the majority of the time FF and TB are going to have the same plugins installed (due to global installation etc).

> Either way, the fix is pretty straightforward: overlay
> the about:addons page to override the openUrl function.
> 
> However, I'm not sure we want *all* links from about:addons to open inside
> Thunderbird. Standard8, do you have any opinions on this? For reference,
> here are the relevant calls:
> <http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/
> search?find=%2Fmozilla%2Ftoolkit%2Fmozapps%2Fextensions%2Fcontent%2F&string=o
> penUrl>

Can we get a short descriptive list as to what these actually call?

Comment 10

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

(In reply to Mark Banner (:standard8) from comment #9)
> Can we get a short descriptive list as to what these actually call?

I was hoping you'd know, actually. Here's what each of them do, I think:

/mozilla/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/content/extensions.xml
    line 665 -- openURL(this.mControl.mAddon.purchaseURL);
      I think "purchasing" is an alternative to installing. I've never seen an add-on like
      this, so I'm not totally sure.

/mozilla/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/content/about.js (View Hg log or Hg annotations)
    line 128 -- openURL(aEvent.target.getAttribute("homepageURL"));
      This goes to the add-on's homepage from the about dialog for the add-on (right click
      an entry in the extensions page and click "about").

/mozilla/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/content/extensions.js (View Hg log or Hg annotations)
    line 749 -- openURL(Services.urlFormatter.formatURLPref("plugins.update.url"));
      This is the "Check to see if your plugins are to date" link in the plugins page
    line 1048 -- openURL(aAddon.purchaseURL);
      This is also related to purchasing, which I'm not sure about.
    line 1158 -- openURL(aAddon.contributionURL);
      This is the link to donate some money to the add-on from the details page.

Comment 11

[Seungbeom Kim]

(In reply to Jim Porter (:squib) from comment #7)
> instead, the plugin check opens in Firefox (on Linux nightly).

FYI: I observe the same on Thunderbird 11.0.1, on Windows.

Comment 12

[Tristan Miller]

(In reply to Jim Porter (:squib) from comment #7)
> I don't see this exact problem: instead, the plugin check opens in Firefox
> (on Linux nightly).

I see similar behaviour in Thunderbird 38.0.1 on GNU/Linux, though the plugin check is opening not in Firefox but in my default browser (SeaMonkey).  However, the plugin check page which opens is specific to Firefox; there is no information about Thunderbird (or even SeaMonkey).  For that issue I already opened Bug 1182915.

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I don't see any link now

Comment 14

[Tristan Miller]

Problem as described in Comment #7 and Comment #12 still reproducible for me in Thunderbird 45.4.0.  To reproduce, go to Tools->Add-ons->Plugins and click on "Check to see if your plugins are up to date".  My default browser, SeaMonkey, gets opened to a page all about Firefox plugins.

Comment 15

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for checking. Yes, I see it in 45.4.0. But I do not see it in beta on windows

Do you see this in beta? http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/channel/
If not, then we can close this.

Comment 16

[Tristan Miller]

I tried downloading the beta version. When I launch it it doesn't find any of my system-wide plugins, so the plugins menu just tells me that I don't have any plugins installed.  There is no "Check to see if your plugins are up to date" link, but that might just be because it didn't find any plugins in the first place.

If you can tell me how to get this beta version to find the system-wide plugins, or how I can manually install plugins, then I can test further.

Comment 17

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Tristan Miller from comment #16)
> I tried downloading the beta version. When I launch it it doesn't find any
> of my system-wide plugins

correct. I'm not sure there is a fixed bug listed in https://mzl.la/2eW3b8p so perhaps there is a bug.
But regardless, the capability will go away when richard's bug 1286328 is done.  So closing this as wontfix

Comment 18

[Tristan Miller]

If there's no way for the new version to find existing system-wide plugins, or to install new plugins locally or system-wide (Bug 365998), then why is there a Plugins menu at all?  Should it be removed?