1581678 - the loop at _loadPluginHandlers is dead code

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect, P5)

Description

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

From https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D45622:

This is dead code at the moment. It's not clear to me if this is meant to display swf for flash here still; I suspect it is, but it looks like navigator.mimeTypes is always a 0-length array on about:preferences, so the loop at _loadPluginHandlers never does anything. Originally this may have been written to deal with pdf plugins but we don't support those anymore.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

:handyman, do you know if we ever supported flash in the application / protocol / file type handling section of the prefs? Or was the plugin code only really there for the sake of NPAPI pdf handlers?

As it's not working correctly right now, I'm tempted to just rip it out - any reasons you're aware of not to just go ahead with that?

Comment 2

[David Parks [:handyman]]

I don't know anything about the history of this apart from what I've been able to dig up but some reasoning, coupled with stuff like bug 757726, suggests that you are right and this code is inspired by some old plugin behavior that has long been unsupported. I certainly don't know of any cases where something like this should trigger Flash and of course others aren't permitted. So it appears that this can be removed.

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Attachment: Bug 1581678 - remove dead plugin code from about:preferences

Because 'navigator.mimeTypes' is always the empty string in the parent process, the loop at
_loadPluginHandlers never does anything, and there's no point keeping this now Flash is going
the way of the dodo anyway.

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/ebcfcf919663
remove dead plugin code from about:preferences r=preferences-reviewers,ntim

Comment 5

[Cosmin Sabou [:CosminS]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/ebcfcf919663