236622 - Clarify what disabling a plugin does in Tools | Options | Downloads | Plug-ins

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[James Darpinian]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040304 Firefox/0.8.0+ (BlueFyre)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040304 Firefox/0.8.0+ (BlueFyre)

Disabling a plugin doesn't actually stop that plugin from being used when pages
use the EMBED tag, although the user interface seems to imply that.  Either the
UI should be reworded to explain exactly what disabling a plugin does or the
plugins should *really* be disabled all the time.  Personally I vote for the
second option, combined with my suggestions from bug 236543.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Ali Ebrahim]

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't this there is any way (or at least any
UI) for disabling plugins (short of moving them out of the plugins directory).
How are you doing this?

Comment 2

[James Darpinian]

In the Options dialog, under Downloads, at the bottom right underneath the list
of file types, there is a button called Plug-Ins.  Clicking that button gives
you a list of currently installed plugins with checkmarks allowing you to
"disable" them.  If a plugin is enabled and you click on a link to that kind of
file or type the address to that kind of file in the address bar (for example
quicktime and
http://images.hollywood.com/images/quicktime/hellboy_col_t_low.mov), the file is
shown in firebird in the plugin.  If the plugin is disabled, the file is
downloaded instead of being shown.  However, if a page uses the EMBED or OBJECT
tags, the "disabled" plugin is still used.

Comment 3

[Ali Ebrahim]

Okay, I see what you're talking about. I agree that the wording is unclear. 

Currently it says: "Disabling Plug-Ins for a file type will cause files of that
type to be download instead of being viewed in the Plug-In", which could be
taken to imply it works everywhere in the applcation, including for EMBED or
OBJECT stuff too, when in fact it only works if you link to the file directly.

It should be reworded in a end-user friendly way to imply that it only has an
effect when downloading the file directly, and not while viewing stuff embedded
in a page.

Comment 4

[James Darpinian]

Like I said in my first comment, I think it would be better to change it to do
what the UI says instead of changing the UI to match what it does now.  I think
it would be more useful that way.  I would love to have an option to download
all embedded quicktime movies instead of watching them in the plugin.

Comment 5

[George Lund]

Not sure if this should be a separate bug: I disabled the PDF plug-in by
unticking it in the list under discussion as a test, and now it has gone from
the list and so cannot be re-enabled.

Comment 6

[James Darpinian]

Well, this bug as it is summarized has been fixed by consolidating this
functionality into the Download Actions dialog.  I still wish there was a way to
disable plugins but I guess that should be a separate bug.