917713 - plugins.notifyMissingFlash has no effect

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[delete-me]

User Agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.16

Steps to reproduce:

I'm using Firefox 24 (same issue with Firefox 23). 
I toggled the pref "plugins.notifyMissingFlash" to false and visited http://mozqa.com/data/firefox/plugins/plugin-test.html.



Actual results:

Firefox offered me to install a lot of plugins, including Flash, Java, Quicktime and Shockwave.
Adding the old pref plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin = true makes no difference, the PFS doorhanger is still there


Expected results:

This is for an enterprise deployment and it is important that users are not prompted to install any additional plugins. However the new pref plugins.notifyMissingFlash doesn't seem to have any effect.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

dolske or cers, do you have somebody who can look at this?

Comment 2

[Paul Silaghi, QA [:pauly]]

Confirmed FF 24, 27.0a1 (2013-09-18)

Comment 3

[Loic]

In FF23 and FF26, with plugins.notifyMissingFlash=true, there is a dialog box appearing under the doorhanger to invit the user to install Flash. With plugins.notifyMissingFlash=false, the dialog box doesn't appear but the doorhanger is still present. See http://i.imgur.com/LrZPL89.png

Of course, in both cases, the user can click on the doorhanger to install the Flash plugin.

Comment 4

[Paul Silaghi, QA [:pauly]]

(In reply to Loic from comment #3)
> Of course, in both cases, the user can click on the doorhanger to install the Flash plugin.
That is the main problem, I think.

Comment 5

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

(In reply to Loic from comment #3)
> In FF23 and FF26, with plugins.notifyMissingFlash=true, there is a dialog
> box appearing under the doorhanger to invit the user to install Flash. With
> plugins.notifyMissingFlash=false, the dialog box doesn't appear but the
> doorhanger is still present. See http://i.imgur.com/LrZPL89.png
> 
> Of course, in both cases, the user can click on the doorhanger to install
> the Flash plugin.

That would be the expected behavior.
delete-me, are you still seeing automatic popups for Flash with the pref set to false?
Or is your issue with the notification icon still showing in the location bar?

Comment 6

[Loic]

(In reply to Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche] from comment #5)
> (In reply to Loic from comment #3)
> > In FF23 and FF26, with plugins.notifyMissingFlash=true, there is a dialog
> > box appearing under the doorhanger to invit the user to install Flash. With
> > plugins.notifyMissingFlash=false, the dialog box doesn't appear but the
> > doorhanger is still present. See http://i.imgur.com/LrZPL89.png
> > 
> > Of course, in both cases, the user can click on the doorhanger to install
> > the Flash plugin.
> 
> That would be the expected behavior.
> delete-me, are you still seeing automatic popups for Flash with the pref set
> to false?
> Or is your issue with the notification icon still showing in the location
> bar?

With the pref set to false, the automatic pop-up from the doorhanger is not displayed, the user must click on the doorhanger to make it appear.
With the pref set to true, it's automatic.

So I guess the role of the pref plugins.notifyMissingFlash is to enable/disable the automatic pop-up about installing Flash. In that case, it's the correct behavior is observed.

Comment 7

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

(In reply to Loic from comment #6)
> So I guess the role of the pref plugins.notifyMissingFlash is to
> enable/disable the automatic pop-up about installing Flash. In that case,
> it's the correct behavior is observed.

Yes, it is. I'm just wondering if delete-me is seeing different (broken) behavior :)

Comment 8

[delete-me]

(In reply to Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche] from comment #5)
> delete-me, are you still seeing automatic popups for Flash with the pref set
> to false?
> Or is your issue with the notification icon still showing in the location
> bar?

There's no automatic popup, just the notification icon. This icon leads you to the PFS, which offers to install all kind of plugins. 
I expected to be able to suppress this icon or the PFS with plugins.notifyMissingFlash = false, the same way as I could do it in earlier versions of Firefox with plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin = true. If this is no longer possible it seems like a regression to me, albeit not a big one.

Comment 9

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

This seems expected, plugins.notifyMissingFlash just makes the "you can install this" doorhanger prompt not display for Flash, so you get only the icon instead. The plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin pref no longer exists, IIRC the intent was to keep a low-key indication that the page may not work properly because you're missing a plugin (see also bug 869191 comment 10).

We only do this for the top 4 plugins which we know how to install (flash, java, shockwave, quicktime), which I suppose is a little inconsistent. OTOH, they're the bulk of plugin usage.

I suppose it would be easy enough to make canInstallThisMimeType() in browser-plugins.js always return |false| if a (new) plugins.prompt_to_install pref is set. Or maybe there are existing prefs to neuter the PFS install wizard, since we never got to replacing that.

Comment 10

[Reuben Morais [:reuben]]

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #9)
> We only do this for the top 4 plugins which we know how to install (flash,
> java, shockwave, quicktime), which I suppose is a little inconsistent. OTOH,
> they're the bulk of plugin usage.

Do we have a bug for not showing the icon at all for plugins that we don't know how to install? (ie. anything on OS X).

Comment 11

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

(In reply to Reuben Morais [:reuben] from comment #10)
> Do we have a bug for not showing the icon at all for plugins that we don't
> know how to install? (ie. anything on OS X).

I don't think so; i filed bug 922107.

Comment 12

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

plugins.notifyMissingFlash apparently works as intended.