469510 - Flash and Java plugins don't work consistently with latest Minefield nightlies

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

If Minefield (on the trunk, aka mozilla-central) ever needs to rewrite
the pluginreg.dat file (which contains information about installed
plugins), it leaves out the Flash plugin (versions 9.0 or 10.0) and
the Java Embedding Plugin (any version).

From this point forward (until you run some other version of Firefox
that re-writes pluginreg.dat correctly), attempts to load Flash
plugins (including Youtube videos) and Java applets will display the
Missing Plugin error.

This bug was caused by the patch for bug 468678 ("remove support for
resource (.rsrc) files in Mac OS X plugins").  Neither the Flash
plugin nor the JEP include mime-type information in their Info.plist
files -- that information is only available in old-fashioned resource
files (included in their bundles' Contents/Resources directories).

A pluginreg.dat file gets rewritten if it's missing or if the current
copy was created by a different major version of Firefox.  So, for
example, FF 3.0.4 will rewrite a pluginreg.dat file created by FF 3.1
or trunk FF.  And trunk FF will rewrite a pluginreg.dat file created
by FF 3.0.X or FF 3.1.

Comment 1

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Flash example:
  http://rogerdean.com
Java example:
  http://java.sun.com/applets/jdk/1.4/demo/applets/Clock/example1.html

Comment 2

[Josh Aas]

Lets fix the Java part of this by landing a new JEP, when do you think you could have that ready?

Comment 3

[Josh Aas]

We'll have to back out the change to fix Flash for now.

Comment 4

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

(In reply to comment #2 and comment #3)

> Lets fix the Java part of this by landing a new JEP, when do you
> think you could have that ready?

I could take a day off next week to do a new JEP version.  But since
we'll still have to back out bug 468678 to deal with Flash, I'd just
as soon put it off.  I'd prefer to wait for the next time I have to
make some other change (for example to deal with another new UUID for
the nsIScriptSecurityManager interface), and add mime-type info to the
JEP's Info.plist then.

I wish I'd remembered this issue the *last* time
nsIScriptSecurityManager changed its UUID :-(

Comment 5

[Josh Aas]

backed out

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/f6dde14a5ed2