1068060 - [E10S] "IE Tab 2 (FF 3.6+)" add-on does not work when E10S is enabled

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Extension Compatibility, defect)

Description

[Paul Harouff]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0
Build ID: 20140916030204

Steps to reproduce:

1. Enable E10S. Open Google site. Select to change rendering engine.
2. Enable E10S. Click a shortcut to any website listed in IE Tab 2 rules to use IE rendering engine.
3. Enable E10S. Click the desktop shortcut to open my Deltek Vision timecard.


Actual results:

1. Blank tab opened with tab name stuck at "Connecting ..." and Google site never loads.
2. Tab opens with shortcut destination loaded in Firefox rendering engine instead of IE.
3. Error message "To run Vision 6.2, you must first install Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 on your workstation. Contact your system administrator for assistance." NOTE: This always happens when the Firefox rendering engine tries to connect to the server. IE Tab 2 add-on is required to open Deltek Vision in Firefox.


Expected results:

1. New tab should have opened with Google site loaded using IE rendering engine.
2. New tab should have opened with the shortcut destination loaded using IE rendering engine.
3. IE rendering engine should have connected to Vision server and opened the DeltekVision.application so I can fill out my timecard.

Comment 1

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

hi, blackfishsoftware, the IE Tab add-on does not work with multiprocess Firefox (e10s). This is a binary add-on, so you will probably need to fix this bug in your code. If you have any questions about e10s support, just drop by the #e10s IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org. MDN also has a good introduction:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Working_with_multiprocess_Firefox

For testers, here's the AMO link to the add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab-2-ff-36/

Comment 2

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

The developer has been notified through AMO.

Comment 4

[Grant]

This addon now seems to work for me...

Comment 5

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

Paul, can you try again? The add-on hasn't been updated since, but it's possible that something changed in Firefox that fixed the problem.

Comment 6

[Jerod Lycett]

This appears to not be working for me in Windows 7 64-bit on Aurora. Can someone try on something older to see if it's an age thing? I'm up to IE11 here, which could be why it's not working, whether in e10s or not.

Comment 7

[Grant]

It works with e10s disabled and IE11 here

Comment 8

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Assignee: Jim Mathies
type: xul
Link to add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab-2-ff-36/
http://www.ietab.net/
Contact info for add-on: Hong Jen Yee (PCMan), http://www.ietab.net/
Add-on ID: {1BC9BA34-1EED-42ca-A505-6D2F1A935BBB}
How well does it work?: 1%, requires plugins runs in non-e10s tabs. Options panel seems to work
Chromium version: couldn't find it

Comment 9

[Bill McCloskey [inactive unless it's an emergency] (:billm)]

Can you dig more into how this one works Jim?

Comment 10

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

From the addons meeting: our thinking is that this can work with the caveat that the plugin would have to load in a chrome tab that is marked as remote. Also if the addon communicates with that tab it would have to do it through normal ipc mechanism for communicating with remote content.

I'll take a deeper look under the hood to see what this addon tries to do.

Comment 11

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Confirming the design here - 

xul overlay addon
chrome web page
full content plugin for the content

const gIeTab2ChromeStr = "chrome://ietab2/content/reloaded.html?url=XXX";

function createIETab() {
    var obj = document.createElement("object");
    obj.id = "IETab2";
    obj.style.width = "100%";
    obj.style.height = "100%";
    // Waterfox/x64 example:
    //   Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20121026 Firefox/16.0
    // Firefox/x32 on Win64:
    //   Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0
    // Firefox/x32 on Win32
    //   Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0
    //
    if (window.navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Win64; x64;") != -1)
        obj.setAttribute("type", "application/ietab2_x64");
    else
        obj.setAttribute("type", "application/ietab2");
    document.body.appendChild(obj);
}
// Navigation happens later, but create the IE Tab object immediately
createIETab();

Comment 12

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

No contact has been made to the developers yet.
The site for the add-on is http://www.ietab.net/
They recommend:
For all support issues, please contact us at [e-mail]

I see on the site that they say "Run Internet Explorer Inside Chrome" I don't see any references to Firefox in there. Doing a search about Firefox on ietab site, we can find 

This page about IE Tab 2.
http://www.ietab.net/ie-tab-2-introduction

The support page goes to http://www.ietab.net/forum which closed with the message.
> We moved the forums to a hosted solution so we can focus our energies on IE Tab and not waste time on forum technology. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause you:

This link goes to http://getsatisfaction.com/ietab/products
which is closed and redirects now to http://retired.getsatisfaction.com/
Searching on their own blog http://blog.ietab.net/?s=firefox
There is no result, while the same search with chrome returns results.

The changelog gives http://www.ietab.net/changelog
November 26, 2015 for the last date, but basically mentioned only Chrome. The current version is 8.*

My feeling is that they decided to stop supporting Firefox a long time ago. I will send an email to the support team

Comment 13

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

You may want to save your case's tracking ticket: 3294_vl1m9vufdjt6ocqv

I sent them an additional email because I didn't get an answer for the last month apart of the automatic responder.

Comment 14

[doncodes]

We have started to investigate this, I'm sure we have many changes to make.

But first:  Testing on Developer Edition 46.0a2, the add-on appears to load, and we can get the page to start to load, but the plugin won't load, it just shows a big gray page with an "X" that says "This plugin is disabled.", and a "Manage plugins..." button, when clicked shows that the plugin is enabled.

Not sure what the next step is, I don't see any tips online about compatibility of npapi plugins in e10s.

Comment 15

[Karl Dubost💡 :karlcow]

Jim, See Comment #14

Comment 16

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

We added a white list flag for 'special' plugins that only load in the chrome process, see bug 1237402.

Comment 17

[doncodes]

An update with a the is pending review.

Per Bill's suggestion, the update sets plugin.load_in_parent_process.application/ietab2 to true, which fixes the problem.

Comment 18

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

With Firefox 57 only WebExtensions are permitted and are, by default, e10s compatible.