1364419 - navigator.plugins does no longer return the full list of installed plugins

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[SAP EPM Addin Team]

Attachment: Test4FirefoxTeam.html

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.96 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

My developed extension is no longer listed when using the java-script API [navigator.plugins] to retrieve the list of installed plugins/extensions.

This can anyway be reproduced with other Plugins.
I have tried with Citrix Receiver and it is even worse, this plugin is not visible in Plugins list page while my extension is still visible in the Extensions page. None of these two (my extension or the Citrix Receiver) will be listed with the javascript.

From my testing I am able to say this appears from the version 52.x of Firefox:
PASS 43.0.1
PASS 47.0.2
PASS 50.0.2
PASS 51.0.1
------
FAIL 52.0.1
FAIL 52.0.2
FAIL 53.0.2
FAIL 54.0b7


Here are the steps to reproduce:
1. Install Firefox 51.0.1
2. Install Citrix Receiver
3. Open the attached testing page [Test4FirefoxTeam.html] or any testing html page of your composition that uses [navigator.plugins] java-script to retrieve the installed plugins/extensions.
4. Replace "Plugin Name Here" by "Citrix Receiver" (without the double quotes)
5. Click on [Detect Firefox Plugins]
6. The script will show you a list of installed plugins and will tell the Citrix Receiver plugin has been found
7. Uninstall Firefox and Install any version starting from 52.0.1 (otherwise update it to the latest version)
8. Do the same as step 3 (open the testing page, type in "Citrix Receiver", click on Detect)
9. The list of installed plugins is reduced to few plugins and does not contain Citrix Receiver
10. You can double check by re-installing the Citrix Receiver but this will be no help



Actual results:

As described in the steps to reproduce the installed plugins are no longer listed by the java-script navigator.plugins  array.

This has also been tested in the 54.0b7 version without success.




Expected results:

The latest versions should also list out all the installed plugins like with 51.0.1.

Comment 1

[Loic]

FF52 doesn't allow anymore plugins, only Flash is allowed. And NPAPI API is going to be removed this year probably.

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This is the intended behavior. Please see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/npapi-plugins?as=u&utm_source=inproduct

Comment 3

[SAP EPM Addin Team]

Just need a quick clarification.
Does this behavior includes Extensions?

My issue is about an XPI Extension we have developed and that has been validated.
Moreover what is confusing is that our Extension is still visible in the Extension page.

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This behavior is about NPAPI plugins. If this showed up in navigator.plugins, it was an NPAPI plugin. In the past XPI extensions (addons) could bundle NPAPI plugins and use them. That is no longer possible.

Comment 5

[SAP EPM Addin Team]

Ok. Thanks for the clarification.