298089 - Firefox activates alien plugins

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Henry James]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

Even though its plugin directory is empty except the manditory NPNul32, Firefox
activates a lot of plugin upon start - without asking me for permission.

It seems Firefox has somekind of "OS-wide plugin finder" which looks for plugins
installed for IE, Opera etc. and activates them, in addition to the plugins in
its own plugin directory. All those plugins then appear in "Options > Download >
File Types > Plugins" and are activated by default.

Problem is, I don't want all my IE plugins to be activated in Firefox. It's one
thing to preform such a search for alien plugins (which is a good thing), but
it's another to do it without asking the user, and finally it's simply
inacceptable to activate the alien plugins silently.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Make sure some other browser like IE is installed, with some plugins;
2. Install Firefox and make sure the plugin directory is empty except NPNul32;
3. Start Firefox.

Actual Results:  
Alien plugins found in IE's and other browser's plugin directory are silently
activated in Firefox.

Expected Results:  
Prompt before performing the search for alien plugins and/or do not activate the
found plugins by default.

The plugin list as in "Options > Download > File Types > Plugins" has a bug so
it "forgets" deactivated plugins sometimes. It seems related but not identical
to this bug, I'll file a seperate report.

Comment 1

[Henry James]

I've filed bug #298091 and bug #298093 which may or may not be related to this one.

Comment 2

[Adam Becevello]

I believe the automatic scanning for plugins is a convenience feature.  I don't
have to explicitly install plugins for Firefox to get them to work.

As for stopping Firefox from doing this scanning, see
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/notes.html and scroll down to the section titled
"Plugin Scanning".  Although those instructions are for getting the scanning to
work with a specific version, setting the version numbers to a high number (I'm
sure 20 should be high enough for now) will stop Firefox from loading those
plugins (tested with the SunJRE preference only)

Is the behaviour described in bug 218877 what you want?  If so, this is a dup.

Comment 3

[Henry James]

I totally agree the automatic plugin scanning is a great and useful feature, but
just like any other great and useful feature, not allowing it to be turn off
turns it into a terrible, nasty bug.

I've known the "set version to higher-than-realistic" hack, but that's a
workaround at best, not a fix. Plus, it only prevents certain specified, but not
all plugins to be scanned, if I'm correct.

As for bug #218877, I don't even understand what it says, since I can't find a
file called "[Firefox install dir]/defaults/pref/winpref.js".

Comment 4

[Adam Becevello]

The path found in Bug 218877 seems to be incorrect for Firefox.  I found the
preferences that are supposed to be commented out in "[Firefox install
dir]\greprefs\all.js"

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.