869819 - click_to_play should hide that plugin is installed until "click"

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect, P5)

Description

[kolAflash]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0
Build ID: 2013032900

Steps to reproduce:

click_to_play should hide the fact that a plugin is installed from the website until the user "clicks to play".

For example the german website
http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/video/video1303852.html
is always using flash for videos, excepting when there's any flash installed. Then it's switching to HTML5 video.
Youtube is showing the same behaviour for videos with HTML5 player available.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKvYDpmSX2Y

So if click_to_play would hide the information that flash is installed, this website wouldn't request flash at all.

Is there a good way to do this or would it require a full website-reload when "clicking to play"? If it brings problems for some websites, maybe there could be an about:config option to enable this behaviour for users willing to test. Or this can be switched on/off per website.

Another way to get a similar effect would be, if I could tell Firefox to which websites it should tell that a plugin is installed. For example tell LastFM (because it's never working without flash) but don't tell Youtube.

Comment 1

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Hiding installed plugins is not something in the scope of click-to-play - especially given that mechanics for deciding when to do this would be rather hard or not generally possible.

Disabling plugins per site sounds more realistic, but this might be better suited for addons. Maybe there already is an addon that does this.

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

At this point we don't have any way to change the behavior of navigator.plugins per-domain. I cannot think of any way to expose that choice to users in a reasonable way, so I'm going to mark this WONTFIX.