458559 - about:plugins screen should suggest to users to set plugin.expose_full_path to true

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, enhancement)

Description

[Jason Spiro]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20080829 Firefox/2.0.0.17
Build Identifier: 

== Background ==

The about:plugins screen uses JS to read the navigator.plugins array then prints the information in that array.  But:
*  because about:plugins is not chrome
*  and because nobody has rewritten it as chrome
*  and because of the security fix for bug 88183
Mozilla normally doesn't tell users the full path to plug-ins in that screen.  But this annoyed me when I used about:plugins today; I hadn't known that I needed to set plugin.expose_full_path to true.

== Feature request ==

So, I think the about:plugins screen should suggest to users:

"To show the full path to each plugin instead of just the filename, type about:config in the address bar then press the Enter key. Find the preference plugin.expose_full_path and change the value to true. Then reload this page. When you are done, change the value back to false for security reasons." (I partly copied that tip from the bottom of http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:plugins)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
*  Go to the URL about:plugins
Actual Results:  
*  Mozilla doesn't show you the full path to your plugins
*  You are frustrated because Mozilla doesn't show the full path and you don't know how to make it show the full path

Expected Results:  
*  Mozilla doesn't show you the full path to your plugins
*  Mozilla suggests to you to set plugin.expose_full_path to true

Comment 1

[Dave Garrett]

This feels like a backwards solution. No page should be telling a user to mess with a hidden pref. Linking to a SUMO article that contains this tip might make sense. (i.e. another link under the 2 at the top) Though, I don't think this is that big of a deal.

Comment 2

[Jason Spiro]

Out of curiosity:  Why do some users ever need to see the full path to their plugins?  (Or should I avoid asking curiosity questions like these on bugzilla?)

In my case, the answer is that I'm currently booted into Windows 98 so I'm using Fx 2.  So I couldn't use Fx 3's convenient new "Tools -> Plugins" menu command to disable Flash.  So I had to do it manually.  I was trying to figure out where in my profile npswf32.dll was stored so I could delete it.  It turned out it wasn't in my profile, and that I had to set plugin.scan.plid.all to false to disable it, but I didn't realize that until after I had set plugin.expose_full_path to true.

Comment 3

[Dave Garrett]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Why do some users ever need to see the full path to their plugins?

Your use case seems to be the only obvious one. There's a few different places plugins can be installed, so finding their locations might occasionally be useful. However, with FF3 this is not really as much of an issue. (and no change for something like this would be done for FF2 at this point)

> should I avoid asking curiosity questions like these on bugzilla?

As long as it's relevant to the bug, by all means ask away. Just not something to the effect of "out of curiosity, why are bananas yellow?". ;)

Comment 4

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

(In reply to comment #3)

> "out of curiosity, why are bananas yellow?"

Because the green chlorophylls break down as they ripen, revealing the yellow xanthophylls that are present.

Comment 5

[:aceman]

I understand why webpages should not see plugin filenames. However FF internal (chrome) pages/UI could show it to the user. But this may be a lot of work to make the separation. Can't full path be shown in the new addon manager in FF4?

Was a resolution decided for this bug? If not, I'd confirm it, it is a valid feature request.

Comment 6

[Dave Garrett]

Adding a way to show paths to plugins elsewhere is potentially good idea, but isn't this request.

I'm just going to go ahead and WONTFIX this one because as-filed it's not viable for the following reasons:

a) Telling users to muck with about:config is bound to cause confusion.

b) This pref was added in bug 88183 to fix a known privacy and security hole whilst allowing a way to manually re-open said hole rather than coming up with a better solution to isolate this information just from the web. Again, this isn't the sort of thing we should be telling people looking for tech support.

c) Even if it is used for a valid reason, if you forget to turn it off you end up leaving it exposed without your knowledge. Case in point: I apparently had turned it on a while back for some reason and still had it on...

d) I think we can all agree that the better solution would be to fix about:plugins or enhance about:addons or about:support to get the desired result locally only and remove this pref outright instead.

I just filed bug 661961 as a request to scrap this pref. See bug 638769 for a request to potentially scrap about:plugins and instead just have that information better listed in about:support. Showing plugin and extension paths there (possibly obscuring user names in paths) would make the most sense.

Also, a two and a half year belated thanks to Justin for the sarcastic comment. ;)