845397 - Requesting access to your camera when it's in use by an external program still shows a visible indicator that the camera is in use

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Site Permissions, defect)

Description

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Steps:

1. Start a call with google+ hangouts with someone
2. Go to http://mozilla.github.com/webrtc-landing/gum_test.html
3. Request and approve permissions for video

Expected:

HARDWARE_UNAVAILABLE is reported and no visible indicators are present that the camera is active.

Actual:

HARDWARE_UNAVAILABLE is reported, but the green visible indicator is shown indicating the camera is in use.

Comment 1

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Don't know about the blocking call on this one. We're technically doing incorrect behavior here showing the icon when we get HARDWARE_UNAVAILABlE. Need info on Maire for a blocking call.

Comment 2

[Maire Reavy [:mreavy]]

I don't think we should block the gUM release for this bug because we "fail safe": We say we have access to the camera when we don't.  If the opposite were true, I'd definitely block.

That said, we should prioritize getting this fixed in Fx22 Nightly and uplifted into Fx21 Aurora soon.  I'm not sure that we should push to get a fix for this uplifted into Fx20 Beta, even if we have a fix very soon, because I'm not sure this fix is worth any risk (even a low risk) to Beta.  Instead I'd rather note this bug in the release notes for Fx20 and be clear that a fix is coming (and when the fix is coming if we know that by the time of the Fx20 release).

Comment 3

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Similar reason as GPU bug - no need to track for 20, but we should get this in for the "followup" stabilization release for gUM

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

This should be fixed by bug 843971.

Comment 5

[Bogdan Maris, Desktop Test Engineering]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0

Called from Windows 7 x64 on Windows 8 x32, result: HARDWARE_UNAVAILABLE appears in red font and the camera is not active. 
Called from Mac OS X 10.8.3 on Windows 8 x32, result: A green camera indicator is present and the camera is active.
There are two different behaviors but none of them are similar to the Actual results from comment 0 so I think this is fixed on Firefox 22 beta 5 (buildID: 20130612084701).