440281 - DNL Reader Plugin no longer automatically installed by the PFS

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit Graveyard :: Plugin Finder Service, defect, P5)

Description

[Dan Amos]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

Up until now, all versions of Firefox have correctly identified the DNL Reader plugin.  Firefox 3 says "Unknown plugin (application/x-msdownload)".

This is not the correct MIME type.  We use application/x-dnl.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Go to http://www.ebook.com/eBooks/Other/Monster_of_Florence/inbrowser
2.Click to download plugin
3.Plugin finder will report the error
Actual Results:  
Plugin did not install

Expected Results:  
Plugin to install and book open

Contact:
Dan Amos
CTO
[e-mail]

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

wget -S http://www.ebook.com/eBooks/TheMonsterOfFlorence.dnl
--17:46:30--  http://www.ebook.com/eBooks/TheMonsterOfFlorence.dnl
           => `TheMonsterOfFlorence.dnl'
Resolving www.ebook.com... 72.32.225.49
Connecting to www.ebook.com|72.32.225.49|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Content-Length: 4037185
  Content-Type: application/x-msdownload
  Last-Modified: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:10:59 GMT
  Accept-Ranges: bytes
  ETag: "322422cb20ccc81:5ff"
  Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
  X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
  Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:46:30 GMT
  Connection: keep-alive
Length: 4.037.185 (3.8M) [application/x-msdownload]

Look at the content type, you have to fix your server configuration.
Tip of the day: You can use http://web-sniffer.net to see the headers from the server.

Comment 2

[Dan Amos]

Thanks for the feedback.  In the past we used the mime type application/x-msdownload because Internet Explorer would not download a DNL file without it.  The latest versions of IE fix this problem, so changing the MIME type on the server to application/x-dnl is feasible.

This still does not fix the problem.  I have done this on a staging server:
http://kent.1stelement.com/kljas/testing/get.dnl

And the plugin installation still does not work:
http://kent.1stelement.com/kljas/testing/get.htm


It finds the DNL Reader 5.5 plugin, then gives me a "Not Available" message and a Manual Install button.  There is no feedback on why it is Not Available.  This has worked on Firefox version up until now.

thanks
Dan

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

The automatic installation of XPIs are currently disabled for flash because the XPI must be updated for Firefox3 (they dropped the install.js support) and couldn't fix the XPI.

The installation works in my Seamonkey Trunk build, I assume that the XPI installation in general is disabled for Firefox3 until they find a solution.

Comment 5

[Vlad Alexander]

Can we get a more detailed explanation of what exactly is the reason why PFS is not installing plug-ins. PFS was auto-installing the XStandard plug-in FF3 release candidates and we are using install.rdf when FF3 makes the request to our server to download the XPI.

We did receive an email from Mozilla a few months ago about the need to use SSL to serve XPI files. Could this have anything to do with this problem?

Comment 6

[Dan Amos]

Has there been any progress on this?

I had switched the MIME type on our server from application/x-msdownload to application/x-dnl.  This allowed the plugin finder service to find our plugin, but the installation still failed.  The manual installer works, but this requires a restart of Firefox.

Unfortunately, the change of MIME type means that Firefox can no longer download and open standalone DNL files (click a DNL link to download and open using the standalone DNL Reader).  I have now changed the MIME type back to application/x-msdownload, so this is working again.

Unfortunately this means the plugin finder service is failing again.  If I go a web page containing out books, eg:
http://www.ebook.com/eBooks/Other/Nextville/inbrowser

When you try to install the plugin you get "No suitable plugins were found".

Is the plugin finder service working?  Do I need to change our XPI file or Javascript to fix this problem?

thanks
Dan

Comment 7

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Downloading should work fine if you use application/x-dnl unless Gecko can handle this internal (installed plugin).
If you have an installed dnd plugin and want to download a file then either use right click on the link and select save as or the server should send a content-disposition attachment header for the file which will force Gecko to download the file.

The remaining problem is AFAIK a Mozilla.org Plugin fidner service problem, I don't know the current status of this problem. I hope someone from the PFS people will comment here...

Comment 8

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

PFS is being retired, and there are no plans to support the installation of additional plugin types (due to history of stability, performance, and security problems plugins introduce). Websites using these plugins should provide their own install information when the plugin is missing or migrate to HTML-based solutions.