1129628 - Click-to-play UI not displayed at nytimes.com

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

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

When I have Flash set as "Ask to activate" and I go to a video at nytimes.com, I do get the notification box for click-to-play. However, the video is shown as a gray box with no "Activate Adobe Flash" notice.

A while ago I clicked "Continue Blocking" in the notification box for nytimes.com. Consequently, it wasn't clear to me that I was missing this video because of Click-to-Play. Eventually I clicked the icon in the URL bar and enabled flash, but it wasn't easy to discover.

It's a pretty common occurrence for me that the "Activate Adobe Flash" UI is missing for some video.

Here's a sample page:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/opinion/our-curse.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

It happens on any video on nytimes.com though.

Comment 1

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

I've seen this, too.  I also have this problem with Facebook video.

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I saw a bug about facebook video the other day, but it was WFM a few days later and I just blamed transient e10s bustage.

Is this bug filed about the e10s or non-e10s configuration?

Comment 3

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

It also happens to me in a non-e10s window.

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I don't have resources to investigate this currently. If somebody wants to debug this, you should set breakpoints at shouldShowOverlay and within handleEvent in PluginContent.jsm:

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/3436787a82d0/browser/modules/PluginContent.jsm#l172
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/3436787a82d0/browser/modules/PluginContent.jsm#l397

And see why we believe that this element isn't big enough or is obscured.

Comment 5

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

Thanks. I looked into this. The problem is that the plugin at the page in question has some video controls overlaying it at the bottom. So we're returning false because of this code:
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/3436787a82d0/browser/modules/PluginContent.jsm#l197

If I remove the [left, bottom] and [right, bottom] elements of the list, then I see the CtP UI. I suspect this is a fairly common problem since Flash is often used for video. Putting the controls in HTML maybe allows them to share code with their HTML5 player (which I wish they would just show by default).

It seems like we're being overly conservative here. If the plugin is obscured, is there any harm in showing the overlay anyway? I realize that right now the decision to show the overlay ties into the decision to show the notification bar. But we could separate those. Does this relate to click-jacking somehow?

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

The conditions we're trying to satisfy are:

* There are cases where plugin elements are completely covered by transparent <div>s, such as the Apple Trailers site. We do not want to show the CtP UI in that case, because there is no way for the user to click the element.
** As a result, we do want to trigger the notification bar to give a click surface.

If you can come up with an alternate heuristic which excludes this case while honoring the case above, I think I'd support it. Perhaps just click-test the bounds of the central "click to activate" div?

Comment 7

[BMO Automation]

Resolving as wont fix, plugin support deprecated in Firefox 85.