268936 - allow user to disable "additional plugins required bar" for given plugin

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

Description

[Ed Halley]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0


The user cannot avoid a recurring yellow bar that says "Additional plugins are
required to display all the media on this page," even if the user is fully aware
of the plugin, and really doesn't want constant reminders.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. visit site using plugin you don't want or can't install
2. observe "Additional plugins are required" yellow bar
3. go to 1.

Actual Results:  

Take Flash as an example.  If you visit a site that rotates some Flash ads and
some GIF ads, then every other page will introduce this bar.  Unless you
successfully install the plugin for Flash, you can't avoid this extra bar that
pushes the rest of the page layout downward.

Expected Results:  

A similar bar warns the user that a popup window has been killed.  I can disable
that bar, and a little "window with red x" icon appears in the status bar to let
me further adjust those options.

I would like to see a green puzzle piece in the status bar, letting me tell the
Plugin manager that I don't want Flash, or at least that I don't want to see the
bar appear on every page that has a Flash element on it.

I'm classifying it as a bug that the two yellow bars don't act consistently.  If
someone wants to downgrade it to an "enhancement," I think it won't get the
attention that this discrepancy really deserves.



Maybe add this to the tracker bug I found with number 253046?

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 261655 for the ability to disable the PFS information bar completely.

Comment 2

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

*** Bug 270127 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 281251 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Kevin Brosnan]

*** Bug 286978 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Paul Rubin]

The advice in comment #1 is useless, see comment #23 in bug #261655 for details.
 The method gets rid of the yellow bar but causes a pop-up instead.  Yucch!

Comment 6

[Kevin Brosnan]

*** Bug 300191 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Daniel Schierbeck]

Maybe have an "Options..." button on the Plugin Required Information Bar that open a dialog that allows the user to disable the notification for the specific plugin type as well as for all types of plugins.

Comment 8

[Flaky Jake]

I'd very much like to see this feature implemented in Firefox 3. Sorry for bugspam if you disagree.

Comment 9

[Jim Rees]

There used to be a workaround for this. You could enable the default plugin by setting plugin.default_plugin_disabled to false, then the plugin finder wouldn't get called.

But this no longer works in FF3. So now there doesn't seem to be any way to disable all plugin nagging.

So that makes it much more important to find a fix for this bug. I suggest it be elevated from "Enhancement" to "Major."

Comment 10

[Olaf van der Spek]

I agree. It's almost five years later. This is Firefox, not IE...
Plugins shouldn't be forced down the users throat.

Comment 12

[Jim Rees]

Six years and counting. I guess we're all so used to being nagged by our browsers that we don't care any more.

Comment 13

[Emil Ivanov]

(In reply to comment #12)
> Six years and counting. I guess we're all so used to being nagged by our
> browsers that we don't care any more.

This is one of the reasons why Google Chrome exists and Firefox lose share... Things are soooo slow, its ridiculous for one bug to be resolved for more than 1 year and there are too many bugs which are resolved a lot more (3 to 10 times) than that.

One bug is not big deal but the point is that its not only this bug, thats why this tactic to ignore small bugs is wrong. At the end you have huge amount of small bugs which cant be resolved because of this infinite ignorance, buggy releases and users can see all these nasty things.

Comment 14

[Jim Rees]

Agreed. The ages of the bugs I have votes on, in years:
2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11

None younger than 2 years because I've given up reporting them. And I don't just complain, I've spent my share of time writing and testing patches, only to see them dropped because no developer cares enough to get them in the tree.

I'm sure Firefox developers have a reason for setting priorities the way they do, but it's not working for me.

Comment 15

[rick darrell]

yeah, i gave up on FF too .... just took way too long to load .... chrome works like a champ and is quite quick ... and lots of nice little plug-ins .... i still use FF .... only at work now and mostly just to debug js errors ... it has gotten a little ridiculous that every 6 months or so i get something about this .... BUT NEVER A NOTIFICATION OF A FIX! :) happy holidays all.

Comment 16

[Emil Ivanov]

I found a solution in about:config there is a pref plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin which is false by default.

Toggled to true and i dont see any disturbing notifications for missing plugins anymore.

Actually this pref is since 2008 when reading bug 261655

Browsing is better now :)

Comment 17

[Hugo Osvaldo Barrera]

Firefox 4 removed the USEFUL statusbar, but still has this annoying *larger* and animated bar, that gets poped up on 5 out of 10 websites, didn't the UI-minimalization team come across this one?

Comment 19

[crxssi]

This issue just bit me hard, also.  Hugo (above) is correct that plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin will only hide the yellow statusbar.  Firefox still overs the static images with large, translucent grey overlays that say "A plugin is needed to display this contect. Install plugin..."

The reason this is such an issue is that it destroys the ability to correctly see the non-flash version of a site.  Most [correctly designed] sites, sensing there is no flash installed, will present a static image instead, or an interactive object not based on Flash.  On our multiuser thin-client system, it is also a problem because we have disabled the ability for users to install addons and plugins, but with these notices/overlays they will try anyway, wasting time and bandwidth.  It also causes a political problem, because now they are constantly reminded that something is "broken" on our system.

Based on another suggestion I found pointing me to this: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Plugin-container_and_out-of-process_plugins  I tried pref("dom.ipc.plugins.enabled", false); and that had no effect.

[target platform: 64bit RHEL 6.1 Linux + 64 bit Firefox 6.0 (mozilla build)]

Comment 20

[rick darrell]

Isnt FF officially dead now? they cant even fix simple issues, after years of reports. I an deleting my account .... i am so sick of hearing about unfixed bugs after years! Do yourself a favor, get chrome.

Comment 21

[Deomid Ryabkov]

sorry, gone to chrome, don't care anymore. un-cc'ing.

Comment 22

[Hugo Osvaldo Barrera]

Seriously, this issue needs fixing.  FORCING users to install third party extensions to get rid of a popup is raelly unacceptable.

And to those who mention chrome, personally, a program that closed a bug that said "URL is trimmed in the URL bar and is missing the protocol" as WONTFIX ("Seeing a URL confuses users") doesn't even deserve to be called a browser.

Comment 23

[heraldo]

Someone with powers could add "parity-opera" to the whiteboard. Opera has an option to never again show the notifier toolbar for a given plugin on the toolbar. The setting is then stored in the profile folder, the user has to manually edit or delete the setting to get the notifier toolbar back for a given plugin again.

Comment 24

[Dave Garrett]

Those posting rants and complaints in here need to stop now. Your comments don't help, and in fact hurt this by cluttering up this report to the point where it is nothing but a din of rudeness that gets ignored.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

Adding [parity-Opera] to the whiteboard per comment 23.

Comment 25

[J D]

Having the same annoyance I found http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disabling_yellow_plugin_bar_-_Firefox

This disables the yellow bar for plugin install requests completly. Good enough for me (for now, would be nice to disable per plugin).

Comment 26

[Andrew Sachen]

I created a pretty simple extension to hide the effects of this bug.

http://realityripple.com/Software/Mozilla_Extensions/Unplug/

However, there are no options or settings, and it adds no functionality to Firefox, it simply hides the yellow bar and the "Plugin Missing" boxes. It does not hide "Plugin Disabled". If you want to toggle the settings, you just have to toggle the extension.

Comment 27

[wiki131wiki]

This bug might be fixed in when the Australis interface is complete.  Does anyone know for sure if that is the case?

Comment 28

[Matthew N. [:MattN] (PM if requests are blocking you)]

(In reply to wiki131wiki from comment #27)
> This bug might be fixed in when the Australis interface is complete.  Does
> anyone know for sure if that is the case?

This bug is unrelated to Australis.

Comment 29

[wiki131wiki]

(In reply to Matthew N. [:MattN] from comment #28)
> (In reply to wiki131wiki from comment #27)
> > This bug might be fixed in when the Australis interface is complete.  Does
> > anyone know for sure if that is the case?
> 
> This bug is unrelated to Australis.

What I mean is, Australis is a complete UI revamp.  Wouldn't it change how the yellow plugin bar is displayed?  Otherwise, it would not fit into the new UI.

Comment 30

[Jim Rees]

Should this bug be closed with WONTFIX?

Comment 31

[wiki131wiki]

(In reply to Jim Rees from comment #30)
> Should this bug be closed with WONTFIX?

If the Australis doesn't change the UI of the yellow plugin bar, it might be worth it to add an end-user option for the hiding of yellow bar instead of making the user make changes to about:config.

Comment 32

[Guillaume C. [:ge3k0s]]

(In reply to Matthew N. [:MattN] from comment #28)
> (In reply to wiki131wiki from comment #27)
> > This bug might be fixed in when the Australis interface is complete.  Does
> > anyone know for sure if that is the case?
> 
> This bug is unrelated to Australis.

I think what wiki131wiki is talking about can be seen here : http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/appWide-notifications-i01/appWide-notifications-i01.html

Comment 33

[Daniel Fitzgerald]

Guys, Firefox 19.0 has the fix.

Go to about:config
and set "plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin" to true.

No more nagging about **** plugins like flash that you don't want.

Comment 34

[family-guy]

"plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin" only hides the infobar, not the annoying overlays

Comment 35

[Daniel Fitzgerald]

ah, that makes since, I haven't seen it because Youtube is now displaying in HTML5 a bit better. The bar was mainly annoying because it would appear telling me i needed flash, even if the video loaded fine in HTML5.

Comment 36

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

The (existing pref) and the changes in bug 839206 will make this largely irrelevant. The in-content "missing plugin" style is also being updated to be less intrusive. This bug is too old and scattered across multiple issues to be actionable.