1423363 - Drop Flash support from Thunderbird now?

Status: UNCONFIRMED

Description

[Jeremy Bicha [:jbicha]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
Build ID: 20171120200216

Steps to reproduce:

My understanding is that Thunderbird Beta (releases later than the Thunderbird 52 series) only support one NPAPI plugin: Flash. This also forces a GTK2 dependency.

So I have a simple proposal: does Thunderbird have any reason in 2018 to support Flash or can we just drop it for 58 or 59?

See also bug 1377445 and https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Plugins/Roadmap

Comment 1

[Tom Prince [:tomprince]]

I'd be a happy to do this, if this is something that we want to do. It'd be nice to have usage data for this.

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin]

Yeah I think it should be fine to drop the flash support going forwards. 
I'm not sure to what degree it can even be made to work anymore, but it's effectively dead anyway since "per-site" enabling would be, eh, the imap or mailbox origins? Or does it apply to flash source origin in Firefox?

Comment 3

[Bryan Quigley]

Opened a bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427877) to try to get some telemetry.  

Otherwise the publicly available indicated Flash is going out pretty fast:

Somewhere around 6% of sites.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-flash/all/all 

65% of Firefox users have Flash *installed* at this point.
https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-plugins

My guess is items like RSS/Atom feeds will likely use Flash less than other sites.

Comment 4

[Magnus Melin]

Feeds often just link to a web page so Flash usage is likely the same as on web pages in general. If it's for something useful, and not just ads... that's another story. And telemetry won't tell you that.

Comment 5

[Bryan Quigley]

If telemetry won't be useful then I'll just do more surveys of websites.

I searched all the default example sites in https://newsblur.com/ RSS feed reader, and couldn't find any with actual Flash usage (some with javascript libraries that supports flash in someway).

I haven't actually been able to find any RSS feeds that use Flash to test with.. If anyone can find an RSS feed, I'd be happy to do some testing.

Btw, the backstory bug for how this affects Ubuntu- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-gnome/+bug/1585903