114780 - Sweep the IE plugins folder for NPAPI plugins

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[Justin L.]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120
BuildID:    2001112009

Upon visiting sites that requre shockwave player, flash 5.0, or other net
content viewing or interpreting software that I have already downloaded for
Internet Explorer, I am prompted to download those software components from the
developer's website. I take this to mean that their presence on my hard drive is
not being recognized, or they are not being searched for by the browser in the
locations in which they reside.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to a site that requires the above mentioned software


Actual Results:  see above

Expected Results:  mozilla should perform an unprompted search of the folders
associated with internet explorer and other browsers looking for this content.
Preferably, it would conduct a search upon instalaion, or at least before I am
prompted to redownload this material. It could ask my consent in moving the
software from the explorer realm to the mozilla realm, or it could have an
option to leave those folders in tact and copy their contents.

Comment 1

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

->Plug-ins component.

Comment 2

[shrirang khanzode]

currently mozilla DOES scan the 4.x netscape plugins folder to locate plugins 
installed. I don't think we pick up plugins from the IE plugins folder and use 
them. invalid?

Comment 3

[av (gone)]

Changing summary. Adding aruner. Whether this bug is invalid or not depends on 
the decision we make.

Comment 4

[Arun Ranganathan]

Mozilla doesn't sweep IE install locations because we don't support ActiveX, and
most IE style plugins are ActiveX controls.  Until we decide to support ActiveX
style plugins, this bug is not valid.  The chances of us treading down the
ActiveX road are very minimal -- correct me if I'm wrong.

Comment 5

[Peter Lubczynski]

Arun,

I think there are two bugs here. The first is the general problem that
installing the browser AFTER installing a plugin won't get the plugin to show up
in the browser and therefore users are usually annoyed as they sit through yet
another download and install of their plugins that are already installed them
once. This  probably should be disussed in another bug or meeting.

This bug is now talking about "sweeping" IE's location for NPAPI plugins,
similar to how to for 4.x. Just like Nav, IE also has a "plugins" folder for
NPAPI plugins.  We'll probably need the Windows registry to correctly locate
this folder on all systems, if it's even there, but on my WinXP system, it's here:
C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\PLUGINS
In that folder, there are many plugins. ActiveX controls are (usually) not
stored in this directory we we know if the DLL is an NPAPI plugins because of
it's name starts with "np" and it's got the right entry points. 

Since IE is (almost) always installed on the system, this folder is kind of a
system-like plugins folder like the Mac uses. I've been thinging about this fora
 while and wondering if we should also scan this folder for NPAPI plugins as it
probably has a good collection of a user's installed plugins? It might produce a
better user experience by us picking those up rather than having them re-install
the plugin.

Comment 6

[Arun Ranganathan]

Peter,

I need more convincing. Can you give me an example of a plugin installation
experience that also gives you an NPAPI plugin in addition to an ActiveX control
if you are using IE as your primary browser?  If the user-agent is detected as
IE, I'm convinced that you only ever get an ActiveX control.  Am I wrong?  Give
me an example!

Comment 7

[Peter Lubczynski]

I have always used IE as my primary browser on WinXP. Looking in my IE plugins
folder, I see Quicktime and Acrobat. I did not manually copy them there.

Perhaps we can do a 4.x-style limited sweep? It looks like some plugin
installers may actually install an NPAPI plugin along with the ActiveX control
for legacy reasons. But some more testing is needed on clean machines....

Shrirang, can ya help out:
1) Get a clean machine without ANY Netscape or Mozilla products. Maybe for a
target machine, use Win98 with IE 5.5
2) Install your favorite plugins. Be sure to at least get Quicktime and Acrobat.
Note: Try to use the ActiveX way of auto-installing rather than manually
downlaoding and executing an EXE (except for Acrobat).
3) Check the IE plugins folder to see what DLL's where dropped there.

Comment 8

[av (gone)]

My impression was that IE copies NPAPI plugins during its installation if it 
detects Netscape installation. I do not think we will get any NP style plugins 
in IE plugins folder if Netscape has never been installed. This is just a guess. 
Another thing -- can NP plugins get downloaded when using IE? I doubt it. Maybe 
only when there is no an ActiveX control available for the specific content. How 
frequent is this situation?

As to the location for NP style plugins in IE installation one can get it from 
here: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IE Setup\SETUP\Path" + "plugins"

Comment 9

[rubydoo123]

The plug-ins triage team (av, beppe, peterl, serge and shrir) have reviewed this
issue and have made the following determination:

This is an enhancement request that may be addressed in the future

Comment 10

[Brant Gurganus]

[RFE] is deprecated in favor of severity: enhancement.  They have the same meaning.

Comment 11

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

NPAPI plug-ins were only supported in Internet Explorer for Windows versions 5.5
SP1 and earlier. These versions are now used by roughly 5 percent of Web users,
so this feature would not achieve very much any more. Reassigning to default owner.

Comment 12

[Josh Aas]

This isn't really a problem these days.