852316 - Expose the plugin UI before a user clicks to play

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect, P5)

Description

[James Hall]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0
Build ID: 20130307023931

Steps to reproduce:

With about:permissions plugins set to "Always Ask", you cannot tell what url the plugin is loaded from.


Actual results:


For example, at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/hello-chrome-its-firefox-calling/, there is an embedded youtube video.  However, simply looking at the site I have no idea where the plugin is coming from and whether or not to trust it.


Expected results:


It would be very nice to have a url popup at the bottom (just like with an html link) during mouseover of the Click to Play overlay.

Comment 1

[Dana Keeler (she/her) (use needinfo) [:keeler] (on leave)]

Regarding showing the url:

(Quoting Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche] from bug 753100 comment 1)
> I don't think this is too useful as:
> a) a URI doesn't necessarily identify a plugin and
> b) object/embed elements don't need to have a URI set

I would add that youtube hosts its flash player at https://s.ytimg.com/yts/swfbin/watch_as3-vflcwIWb1.swf which is pretty useless for determining where it's actually coming from and if it's trustworthy (that's if you embed it directly instead of doing the iframe thing, but you get the idea).

Comment 2

[James Hall]

That makes sense, many users probably wouldn't be interested in that information to start with.  But how many "average users" actually look at the full url popup at the bottom of the screen before clicking the blue words?

It would be just nice to be completely informed about whats going on under the overlay.  Right now it is a mystery and for the users that wouldn't care, it wouldn't be intrusive.

Personally, I know about ytimg and would like to know where the plugin is coming from before blindly clicking on it.  This seems especially important if Click to Play is going to be used to soft block outdated plugins.

Icing on the cake: the popup would also show which plugin is under that particular overlay.

Example:
"[Plugin: Flash] https://s.ytimg.com/..."

Comment 3

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I suspect what will be more effective here are other various changes for CTP to make it "just work" in a less-annoying way. Possible examples: whitelist YouTube by default, and autoplay plugins the user will usually play anyway.

To a certain degree, if the user has to look at the plugin's URL to make a choice, we've already lost because that's a bad experience.

If you're a use that simply wants an extra degree of info/control that's not relevant to most users, then this is something probably better suited to an add-on.

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Not something we're going to fix in-product.

Comment 5

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #3)

> I suspect what will be more effective here are other various changes for CTP
> to make it "just work" in a less-annoying way. Possible examples: whitelist
> YouTube by default, and autoplay plugins the user will usually play anyway.

This is what Firefox 25 does now : autoplay *now*, *together*, the plug-ins I will usually play anyway *later*, *one by one*. When I have 5 songs in YouTube, I want to listen to the 5 songs, *but not at the same time* ! Click-to-play serves not only to let the user decide *whether* to play the plug-in, it also serves to let the user decide *when* to play the plug-in. Firefox was good at that in previous versions, it would be nice to have that back. Thank you.