1367356 - Add telemetry to measure how many Flash contents are blocked by blocking autoplay media

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, enhancement)

Description

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

We would like to know how many Flash content are used daily, especially using Flash to play video.

Comment 1

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Hi, Benjamin,
Do you know whether we can know the Flash content is used for video or not? and where could we add the telemetry probe?
Thanks!

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

You can count the number of values recorded in BLOCKED_ON_PLUGIN_INSTANCE_INIT_MS to see how many plugin instances total are instantiated. Unfortunately for this case that histogram is keyed on the plugin name+version, so you can't get the answer from telemetry.mozilla.org but have to use a more custom query. (And that's prerelease-only).

I don't know of any way to tell programatically whether a particular Flash instance is being used for video or not. You'd have to construct the algorithms for that. You might be able to add some telemetry to determine whether it *plays sound*, since we have a programmatic API between Flash and Firefox to show the mute icon.

My guess is that about 95% of Flash is not video, although a lot of that is advertising trackers which don't matter.

Also do you need to distinguish between advertising Flash (which might be video) and "real" video?

Comment 3

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Since we can't fix the bug1350947, the there is the difference between Flash and other HTML5 media stuffs in their actual behavior. In last discussion, UX and PM want to know how many Flash content would be blocked and the blocking time in order to handle the inconsitentency in UX level.

Comment 4

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Attachment: Bug 1367356 - add the telemetry probe for blocked Flash media. [WIP]

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/152146/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/152146/

Comment 5

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Since Adobe has announced that they won't support Flash in the future, I think we don't need to add the telemetry at all.