294271 - User should be notified when unsupported content is found

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Andrés Delfino]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050427 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050427 Firefox/1.0+

When theres content in a page wich Firefox doesn't support (for example,
ActiveX, VBScript), the user should be notified with a message in the
information bar (the same bar which notifies whenever a popup is blocked).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Wolf [:wolf]]

An ActiveX object, maybe, should perhaps spawn a missing plugin notice. But
Firefox should /ignore/ content that it doesn't support. Its a waste of time to
implement checks for content that there's absolutely no intentions of ever
supporting. Degrading gracefully makes sense to me here.

Comment 2

[Ben Fowler]

Could I vote against this? It seems very far from future-proof, and might even
enable DoS attacks.

My views may change, but I feel that the web is as yet immature enough that 
the responsibility for ascertaining the constituency of users is with the
web author.

If you wish to use, say, ActiveX, then it is your responsiblity to judge
how many people (if any) can utilise it as you expect, and what provision
to make for others.

There is already an inline notification for plug-ins - could this do
what you want?

Comment 3

[Andrés Delfino]

I think users -s-h-o-u-l-d- MUST know when they aren't getting all the power of
a page.

Comment 4

[Andrés Delfino]

The other day I enter a site, and tried to fill a form. Everything went well
until I reached a step when I was supposed to see different jobs. Well, I didn't
see any of them. Because that site was supposed to be open in Internet Explorer.

I KNOW that site is poorly designed, but I didn't realize at first. That's way I
think users MUST know when Firefox can't handle specific content, instead of
wasting time.

Comment 5

[Steve England [:stevee]]

Wolf has marked this bug a WONTFIX for a reason. Reopening it will achieve
nothing except anoying people.