855120 - Remove seldom-used plugins from current PFS

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit Graveyard :: Plugin Finder Service, defect)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Part of ongoing plugin work in the browser is changing the set of plugins we'll offer to install. See bug 848160 for details, including bug 848160 comment 2 for the decision on what plugins to support.

I think we should go ahead and remove them from PFS now. The usage of the proposed removals is so low that there's no significant downside to it. And by cropping the current list now, we can flush out any surprises separately from the changes in bug 836415 et al.

Summary of changes (in order of current pfs.py code):

KEEP 1) Adobe Flash
KEEP 2) Adobe Shockwave
nuke 3) Real Player
KEEP 4) Apple Quicktime
KEEP 5) Java
nuke 6) Adobe Acrobat
nuke 7) Viewpoint Media Player
nuke 8) Windows Media Player
nuke 9) XStandard XHTML WYSIWYG Editor
nuke 10) DNL Reader ("digital web books")
nuke 11) VideoEgg Publisher
nuke 12) DivX Web Player

Only 3 of the removed plugins show up in the stats in bug 848160, ergo the rest are < 0.12% of daily PFS hits.

  Windows Media (4.50%)
  PDF (0.55%)
  DivX (0.13%)

[Bug 836415 also suggests tweaking the Quicktime URLs for Mac/Linux, but let's keep this bug focused purely on removing entries.]

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Bug 836415 has now removed the Plugin Finder Service (PFS) from Firefox. As a result, I'm closing all the remaining PFS bugs.

If you're getting this bugmail for an ancient PFS bug, the basic summary of the world today is:

* NPAPI plugins are a dying technology
* PFS was already restricted to assisting with only the 4 most common plugins
* Sites commonly provide their own UI for install a required plugin
* Mozilla is generally focusing on  improving the web platform so that proprietary plugins are not required.

(Note that "plugins" are a completely separate from "browser extensions", such at those found on addons.mozilla.org. The latter are not going anywhere, and are not impacted by the removal of PFS.)