Closed Bug 782672 Opened 12 years ago Closed 12 years ago

Block-list old Versions of silverlight on Mac

Categories

(Toolkit :: Blocklist Policy Requests, defect)

Product:
Toolkit
Component:
Blocklist Policy Requests
Platform:
All
macOS
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
major

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: tdowner, Assigned: jorgev)

References

Details

Silverlight on Mac has been killing us recently, especially the older 4.X versions (Currently it is at 5.1.10411.0). The older versions have resulted in several bugs, such as bug 753251, as well as bug 769398 comment 19. We should investigate blocking at least the 4.x versions in firefox to help alleviate the crashes (the netflix issue is still up in the air on if updating will alleviate the problem or not).
Do we have any numbers on how serious the problem is for the different versions? Is it mostly a problem in the 4.* branch, some of the 5.* branch, or distributed among all versions including the latest one?
Assignee: nobody → jorge
Also, can you tell me what the "(all?)" is for? Is this also a problem in other platforms, or was that referring to all versions?
I can take a look tomorrow and pull some of the affected versions from users we've been working 1:1 with. Going off what I have right now, 4.0.51204.0 and 4.0.50401.0 are both problematic and causing crashing in Hotmail on Mac. These are fixed by upgrading to the latest version. 

I put all as I'm not sure if we should confine this to just Mac, or all Platforms. I want to take a look this week and see if there are also issues recently involving Silverlight on windows as well. At this time I don't believe there are as large of issues on Windows however, so I don't think that is needed at this time (that can always change later).
Problem causing versions:
4.0.51204.0
4.0.50401.0
4.0.60129.0
All these users reported that the hotmail issue was fixed upon upgrading silverlight.
This seems to be spread across the whole 4.x branch. We should just block anything under the 5.1 branch (current).
Since we cover Silverlight in the plugincheck page, we can use the lowest block level, which just urges users to update to the latest version and directs them to the plugincheck page. The notification will appear every time they visit a page that uses Silverlight.

We need to eventually remove the block, since the message can't be dismissed (in some cases?) and it can become extremely annoying, and it's possible some users can't update for whatever reason. After evaluating the success of this block we can consider doing a softblock next if necessary.
Jorge,
The one problem I can see, and correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the big crashes in the older versions of silverlight is a crash on webpages such as Hotmail. Some users are getting this crash as soon as they navigate to the website. My only worry would be that they would never see this update prompt. but we can launch this, watch the crash stats, and if they don't go down significantly I'd urge a Softblock. My only concern.
Ah, I wasn't aware of this. A softblock is more appropriate then.
The block is now staged here:
https://addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/firefox/blocked/p123

The version range has been tentatively set from version 0 to 5.0.9, so try to cover all old versions up to the 5.0.* branch. I'll try to contact Microsoft to give them a heads up and see if the version range is correct.
Keywords: qawanted
QA Contact: jbecerra
I tried version 4.0.60310.0 of Silverlight and that got blocked, but version 5.0.61118.0 does not seem to get blocked using the usual procedure to test.

Version 5.1.x does not get blocked as expected.
Blocks: 753251, 769398
(In reply to juan becerra [:juanb] from comment #9)
> I tried version 4.0.60310.0 of Silverlight and that got blocked, but version
> 5.0.61118.0 does not seem to get blocked using the usual procedure to test.

Yes, 5.0.61118.0 > 5.0.9. I'll adjust the max version to 5.0.99999 when I push it to prod.
 
> Version 5.1.x does not get blocked as expected.

Thanks!
Blocked:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/blocked/p129

Blog post:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2012/08/22/blocking-old-silverlight-on-mac-os-x/
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 12 years ago
Keywords: qawanted
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Summary: Block-list old Versions of silverlight on Mac (all?) → Block-list old Versions of silverlight on Mac
what about Silverlight version 4.1.10329 mentioned in Microsoft Support KB article 2690729:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2690729/en-us
this is the most recent security update for Silverlight 4.x.

will that specific version of Silverlight for Mac be blocked or not?
That version is included in the block. Is there any reason you can't upgrade to Silverlight 5?
Product: addons.mozilla.org → Toolkit
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