450046 - Detection by browser if a plugin is "installed but disabled" or "not-installed"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 391728

(Toolkit Graveyard :: Plugin Finder Service, enhancement)

Description

[Parag]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1

Consider a site that uses a plugin to run some of its code/feature but i have it disabled it in the addons menu. Is there a way to tell user that "plugin is available but disabled" instead of making him install it again? Say i disable flash or some video-specific plugin (quicktime or vlc for instance) and then i go to a site that requires that plugin. It would be less hassle if i was reminded that plugin is disabled.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Disable a plugin (say quicktime) from addons menu
2.Go to a site (say a video site like http://home.att.net/~cherokee68/qtmovie2.html) to try to play a video
3.Video doesnt play but tells you to install quicktime software
Actual Results:  
Either that website feature does not respond (like the above quicktime link) or firefox tries an alternate step of downloading that feature (a mp3 playlist file from say muxtape.com) or the website asks the user to get the plugin (like in adobe flash installation widgets)

Expected Results:  
detect the plugin from installed as well as disabled list and tell user that plugin is disabled.

I am not sure if this is really important but it would be a nice UI feature unless there are some security concerns that i am not aware of.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

I don't know whether we can inform web sites that the plugin is installed-but-disabled, but we can certainly fix the Plugin Finder Service UI in situations where the PFS does come up.