943382 - Disable the notification bar for plugins by default

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=932854
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=942461

We added a notification bar for hidden plugins. A follow-up bug asks for this to be pref-able. I'm going to argue here it should actually be disabled by default, until we get plugin whitelisting or at least other Flash handling.

In the current situation, people who use/enable click to play are going to be advanced users. Due to limitations of our current click to play implementation, every site using Flash somewhere will trigger this NAG. This means that you will get the NAG bar constantly during normal browsing operation. 

Step back here for a bit. We have a feature that is meant to disable (obnoxious/insecure) plugins. The end effect of this feature for the normal user is that he constantly gets NAGGED instead. I hope it's not disagreeable that being NAGGED a lot during browsing is annoying.

What's worse, we get NAGGED to enable Flash on pages where it's not even contributing to anything visible. i.e. the sites where click-to-play would be most useful to get useless Flash out of the way, we're now constantly NAGGED by our own browser.

The current implementation is annoying enough that it would cause me to disable click-to-play, because it's adding to the Flash annoyance, not solving it. If we accept that our UX is temporary and unfinished, I think it's more beneficial to disable the UI for now, rather than leave it enabled and risk that many people turn off the actual feature we eventually want to be tested.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

> In the current situation, people who use/enable click to play are going to be advanced users.

This is not true, since we are now enabling click-to-play by default for all plugins except for Flash. We are specifically *not* tuning the UI for Flash, but for the rest of the plugin ecosystem. Users who want Flash to be click-to-play probably want to use a dedicated flashblock/adblock addon in any case.

Comment 2

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

So you're saying that although you can set Flash as "Ask to Activate" in the Plugin config, this isn't actually a supported configuration in the UX sense? Basically, that click-to-play isn't meant to be used for Flash?

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

CtP is inherently confusing for most users, so yes, we made the decision that by default Flash would be enabled. The CtP UI is tuned for cases where if a site asks for a plugin, we should make that discoverable. Since your case of usually *not* wanting to activate a plugin for a site that asks for it, you need to use an extension to customize the UI.