1738533 - Remove unnecessary about:plugins page

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 747301

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, task)

Description

[Patrik Krajcovic [:patricek] (she/her)]

Attachment: UnnecessaryPageAboutPlugins.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:93.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/93.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open about:plugins page,
2. This will open a “plugin management”,
3. It's no longer needed (because plugins are in about:addons).

Actual results:

This page is pre-australis (and it's no longer needed due to about:addons page)

Expected results:

All plugins should be now managed only in about:addons page

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Toolkit::Add-ons Manager' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

Gijs - do you have an opinion on whether to keep or remove about:plugins?

about:plugins doesn't offer plugin management, it just lists the available plugins (OpenH264 and Widevine). It doesn't have anything to do with Proton.

Additionally:

• about:plugins links to a SUMO article about why plugins aren't supported any more.
• about:plugins is referenced by about:support.
• about:plugins also lists the full path to the plugin's install location, the section at about:addons does not (about:plugins can easily be accessed by a URL, whereas the plugins section of about:addons does not offer that ability).

There is some (marginal) value in about:plugins over about:addons, but supporting this is not entirely free (e.g. general maintenance and l10n).

Comment 3

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

needinfo for question in comment 2:

Gijs - do you have an opinion on whether to keep or remove about:plugins?

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Rob Wu [:robwu] from comment #2)

Gijs - do you have an opinion on whether to keep or remove about:plugins?

about:plugins doesn't offer plugin management, it just lists the available plugins (OpenH264 and Widevine). It doesn't have anything to do with Proton.

Additionally:

• about:plugins links to a SUMO article about why plugins aren't supported any more.
• about:plugins is referenced by about:support.
• about:plugins also lists the full path to the plugin's install location, the section at about:addons does not (about:plugins can easily be accessed by a URL, whereas the plugins section of about:addons does not offer that ability).

There is some (marginal) value in about:plugins over about:addons, but supporting this is not entirely free (e.g. general maintenance and l10n).

I think this is a question for the folks who know about our EME stuff, so 302 to Bryce. I imagine we can move whatever stuff we want into about:addons, though of course that is also work...

I'll add that we use about:plugins for a bunch of random testing unrelated to plugins themselves, so removing it may not be trivial (we can't just throw away all the testing coverage that happens to use it as a test page).

Comment 5

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

My gut feeling on the EME/GMP side is there's no problem having all this data in about:addons. As above, there's a little extra data we could surface there that we don't currently have (mostly full path to plugin), but it doesn't seem like a big deal to move. I assume those pages do not expose their information to any other contexts, but just in case -- we don't want the path to a GMP plugin to be exposed anywhere because it involves the users profile dir. I assume that moving it wouldn't change this, but I'd rather be safe than sorry and make the question explicit.

I don't know if I'm the right person to make the front end changes, but if no one else is then I can put it in the queue of GMP-ish stuff I have.

Comment 6

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

Not sure this is our bug until the decision is made what to do with about:plugins.

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie from comment #6)

Not sure this is our bug until the decision is made what to do with about:plugins.

Who do you believe makes that decision, if not you or the other people who have voiced their opinion here?

Comment 8

[Rob Wu [:robwu]]

The bug was opened to ask for the removal of about:plugins, supported by the claim that the info is already in about:addons.
In comment 2, comment 4 and comment 5 it became clear that there is a non-zero benefit of the existence of the page, and that some info (path to plugin) shouldn't be in about:addons.

In the discussion during today's bug triage within the extensions team, we were inclined to close this bug or treat it as a low-priority bug at most.
Someone thought that someone from the front-end team should make the decision, but I already pointed out that Gijs has already forwarded the request.
I'm not sure whether there are any plugin (GMP) owners who have a strong opinion either way.

If it were up to me, I would close this bug.

Comment 9

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

I'm probably a good person to comment from the GMP side. I do not have strong feelings and agree this could be closed or low priority.

Comment 10

[Michael Froman [:mjf]]

I'm also fine with closing or marking low priority as removing the page doesn't seem to be a clear win.

Comment 11

[:Gijs (he/him)]

OK, let's resolve per the previous set of comments, then.