572446 - Firefox is missing the plugins directory

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Don Park [:donpdonp]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.3a5pre) Gecko/20100610 Minefield/3.7a5pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.3a5pre) Gecko/20100610 Minefield/3.7a5pre

My normal procedure to install firefox and abode flash is to untar the firefox tarball and place libflashplayer.so into firefox/plugins/. The last nightly build untar's to firefox/ without a plugins/ directory. Is this intentional?

I can create the plugins/ directory and firefox will use the libflashplayer.so file, but I'm not sure if this is the "correct" procedure anymore.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. untar firefox for linux
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
missing plugins/

Expected Results:  
expected plugins/

Comment 1

[Dave Garrett]

The "Default Plugin" was removed a bit back because it was no longer needed, thus no plugins are included with a default install and no dir exists. I don't know if the removal of the dir itself was intentional or not, but shipping an empty dir doesn't seem necessary. I guess there's a possibility a plugin installer might get confused, but we could just list this change under the list of changes for Firefox 4 that certain things might need to adapt to.

Comment 2

[Don Park [:donpdonp]]

well its no showstopped but i believe the plugins/ folder is a common form of installation for linux users. the first comment in the blog post below says the same thing - where did plugins/ go? Having the directory gone doesnt tell me it needs to be created, it tells me firefox 3.7 has a radically different way to handle plugins, which is not the case.

http://ffextensionguru.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/firefox-3-7gecko-1-9-3-alpha-5-released/

Comment 3

[Dave Garrett]

I understand what you're getting at: the coincidence of this change happening around the same time as the Addon Manager overhaul implies that a plugins dir is no longer applicable.

I noticed this same peculiarity myself recently, as my nightly update/installation script choked on Flash symlinking when the dir went away, but it only took a second to just recreate the dir and notice that it works fine.

I just skimmed through the bug where the plugin and dir were removed, and:

(In bug 533891 comment #24)
> (In reply to bug 533891 comment #21)
> > which is a really poor error message for 'firefox/plugins doesn't exist'. If we
> > still support loading out of plugins/ then it would make sense to leave an
> > empty directory there, and it would make the automation happy.
> 
> There was some discussion about this in #developers and josh/bsmedberg decided
> against it. We'll work around this in Buildbot in the dependent bug.

Based on that decision the lack of a default plugins dir is intended.

I've amended the new in FF4 MDC page for this, as it wasn't on there:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_4_for_developers#Other_changes

Comment 4

[Don Park [:donpdonp]]

Yes thats the context that threw me off - the overhaul of the addons manager made it much more likely to think that a departure from plugins/ was happening at the same time. thanks for the link to the other bug.