445904 - Plugin Finder Service never finds plugins

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit Graveyard :: Plugin Finder Service, defect)

Description

[vick]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

The PFS is able to detect what plugins are needed to display whatever object that needs to be displayed, but are never automatically installed. most plugins require manual install and when the button is clicked the page that i am redirected to is usually a page that cannot be found or the wrong plugin. (i.e. when i needed to install the shockwave player plug in i was redirected to the "slim" version while i needed the "full" version.)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.go to a page that requires a plug in (the one i;m having trouble with is the myspace games page which requires the oberon game host plugin
2.click the "install missing plugins" button that appears
3.try to install missing plugins
Actual Results:  
firefox could not find the plugin and suggested manual install, manual install redirected me to a page that was non-existent.

Expected Results:  
the plugin finder service should have been able to automatically install the missing plugin

Comment 1

[Brian]

Be careful with Oberon game host.  It creates popups galore.  I got it when downloading a game from an international website.  I couldn't get rid of it.  When a new version of FireFox came out, it became obsolete so I didn't try to update that add-on.  After that, my popups no longer occurred.  However, I still don't know how to prevent FireFox from attempting to get the latest version of the Oberon game host.  This is what I'd like to know.

Comment 2

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Bug 836415 has now removed the Plugin Finder Service (PFS) from Firefox. As a result, I'm closing all the remaining PFS bugs.

If you're getting this bugmail for an ancient PFS bug, the basic summary of the world today is:

* NPAPI plugins are a dying technology
* PFS was already restricted to assisting with only the 4 most common plugins
* Sites commonly provide their own UI for install a required plugin
* Mozilla is generally focusing on  improving the web platform so that proprietary plugins are not required.

(Note that "plugins" are a completely separate from "browser extensions", such at those found on addons.mozilla.org. The latter are not going anywhere, and are not impacted by the removal of PFS.)