919734 - Improve usability for click-to-activate plugins (e.g. Garmin Communication Plugin) because users might not know how to activate them

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 932854

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[monter]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130923004006

Steps to reproduce:

Connecting with Garmin Communicator Plugin API.
For example: http://software.garmin.com/en-US/gcp.html


Actual results:

Garmin Communicator Plugin NOT detected. Download and install now


Expected results:

It works in previous Firefox versions. Checked in 25 and 24.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Plugins are now click-to-activate by default. Is there a grey or blue plugin icon in your location bar which lets you activate the plugin?

Comment 2

[monter]

Attachment: Aurora 26 - GCP not detected

There is a blue plugin icon. Look at the attachement/screenshot.

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This is by design. You can enable the plugin for this site using the icon.

Comment 4

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Benjamin, sorry when I reopen it but I feel that the current behavior of click-to-activate will cause problems for the majority of our users, who are not that technically skilled and aware of this button. Even I for myself had issues this morning to activate the Garmin communicator plugin on their website to upload my latest routes. And if that's already the case I wonder how other uninformed users will react on.

1. When you load the given page there is no indication that plugins are available. There is only the blue plugin icon in the location bar. This is very hard to spot. I would have expected that we at least show the door hanger notification with the announcement that specific plugins have been blocked from execution on that page. Is there any reason why we are not doing that similar to any other feature e.g. WebRTC?

2. When you finally found the blue icon and you enable the plugin, it will still not work. You are forced to manually reload the page. Why can't the enabled plugins not be loaded immediately? If that wouldn't work, we should at least inform the user that a reload has to happen. As of now a lot of users might not know what else they would have to continue their work.

Comment 5

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Re 1.: The discoverability issue is possibly getting improved - it's probably hard though to find a good balance between annoying and discoverable:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2013-September/000894.html
... i'm not sure if we have a specific bug on file though.

Re 2: The plugin is started immediately, but not every site works with plugins that load "at some later time".

Comment 6

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

(In reply to Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche] [away Oct 24 - Nov 10] from comment #5)
> Re 1.: The discoverability issue is possibly getting improved - it's
> probably hard though to find a good balance between annoying and
> discoverable:
> https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2013-September/000894.html
> ... i'm not sure if we have a specific bug on file though.

That's true and I'm not a UX guy. So I would relay to the appropriate people here. It was just my experience this morning again and I haven't found a bug about it.

> Re 2: The plugin is started immediately, but not every site works with
> plugins that load "at some later time".

So for the Garmin communicator plugin it will be loaded immediately when you open the page. But it might be that this is done via JavaScript. Not sure if that is the cause here.

Comment 7

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

(In reply to Henrik Skupin (:whimboo) from comment #6)
> > Re 2: The plugin is started immediately, but not every site works with
> > plugins that load "at some later time".
> 
> So for the Garmin communicator plugin it will be loaded immediately when you
> open the page. But it might be that this is done via JavaScript. Not sure if
> that is the cause here.

Going by the URL field here:
* they tell you that the plugin isn't installed when it is just ctp-blocked (they should check navigator.plugins to differentiate)
* after allowing (and hence starting) the plugin on the site their script doesn't notice that (they could detect that)
* they install the plugin via an extension, which means they could just always enable their plugin on their site(s)

Given those points maybe this should be in Tech Evangelism if this is a bigger site? We should have a "best practices" document for such cases soonish.

Comment 8

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Whatever is best here. I wonder how the plugin works without the additional JS code around it.

Comment 9

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Moving this to Tech Evangelism per comment 7. We now have a preliminary site author guide up for click-to-play:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Site_Author_Guide_for_Click-To-Activate_Plugins

Comment 10

[Richard Maher]

(In reply to Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche] [away Oct 24 - Nov 10] from comment #9)
> Moving this to Tech Evangelism per comment 7. We now have a preliminary site
> author guide up for click-to-play:
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Site_Author_Guide_for_Click-To-
> Activate_Plugins

The arrogance of the authors is simply breathtaking and only surpassed by their contempt anyone outside the rarefied atmosphere of Ben's cabal :-(

In case the view from the ivory tower is completely obscured let me point out that what you're seeing is a backlash. Anyone with love for FireFox and respect for its user-base would start LISTENING to what is being said, own the mistake, and roll-back/turn-back from the hidden agenda to kill Java.

Comment 11

[u279076]

Adding this to the dependency list for click-to-play.

Comment 12

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I don't mind tech-evangelizing Garmin, but I don't think we need to track it. The rest of this bug is about discoverability, which is fixed in bug 932854.