NPAPI Plugins Future, Linux specific questions

Discussion:

g***@gmail.com

2015-10-09 15:01:25 UTC

I'm happy to hear that Mozilla is going to drop NPAPI plugins (https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/)

How will the block all other non-Flash NPAPI plug-ins work? Will it be dependent on a specific version of flash that's dropped/changed some of the NPAPI API?

Two related (sub)questions:
Linux is on Flash 11.2 which hasn't been getting many of the other improvements for Flash (and is set to be removed in Feb 2017 anyway). Will support for this be removed with the rest of NPAPI at EOY 2016?
Will other Flash implementations (like Gnash and Lightspark) be blocked too?

Plug-in container
Ubuntu recently had to stop sending bug reports automatically to Mozilla (this is temporary), the results was an influx of plug-in container error reports to Ubuntu's tracker [1]. I haven't been able to find anywhere near that number of reports in the crash-stats error tracker [2]. Is there something I'm missing or does Mozilla get a very low subset of the plug-in based errors from Ubuntu users?

For Ubuntu 14.04 LTS the Chromium devs decided to drop NPAPI support early (by about 2 releases) so it would never be present in the LTS release, which is supposed to maintain (close-to) feature parity for 5 years. The next LTS is 16.04 (Aprils 2016 release) and I'm wondering if Ubuntu should plan to do the same for Firefox. Any thoughts?

Are there any other Linux specific plug-in plans you can share?

Thanks!
Bryan

[1] https://errors.ubuntu.com/?package=firefox&period=day (those are some of the highest crash results in Ubuntu total)
[2] https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/products/Firefox/versions/44.0a1/date_range_type/report/crash_type/all/os_name/Linux/result_count/50?days=7

Benjamin Smedberg

2015-10-09 15:18:35 UTC

Permalink

Post by g***@gmail.com
How will the block all other non-Flash NPAPI plug-ins work? Will it be dependent on a specific version of flash that's dropped/changed some of the NPAPI API?

The current Flash whitelist is based on the MIME type for Flash. We may
change that in the future, but I don't have specific plans.

Post by g***@gmail.com
Linux is on Flash 11.2 which hasn't been getting many of the other improvements for Flash (and is set to be removed in Feb 2017 anyway). Will support for this be removed with the rest of NPAPI at EOY 2016?
Will other Flash implementations (like Gnash and Lightspark) be blocked too?

How we decide to support Flash in the future is an open question that
we're working on with Adobe.

Post by g***@gmail.com
Plug-in container
Ubuntu recently had to stop sending bug reports automatically to Mozilla (this is temporary), the results was an influx of plug-in container error reports to Ubuntu's tracker [1]. I haven't been able to find anywhere near that number of reports in the crash-stats error tracker [2]. Is there something I'm missing or does Mozilla get a very low subset of the plug-in based errors from Ubuntu users?

I don't know. We have fairly high plugin crash rates in general,
although typically more on Windows than on other OSes.

Post by g***@gmail.com
For Ubuntu 14.04 LTS the Chromium devs decided to drop NPAPI support early (by about 2 releases) so it would never be present in the LTS release, which is supposed to maintain (close-to) feature parity for 5 years. The next LTS is 16.04 (Aprils 2016 release) and I'm wondering if Ubuntu should plan to do the same for Firefox. Any thoughts?

Are you the maintainer, or who should I talk to about this? I think it
might be reasonable to limit support to just Flash for the LTS release,
but I'd want to talk to people about their goals. Mozilla as a project
is clearly not interested in maintaining 5-year support cycles for
anything, so we'd encourage people to continue using Firefox mainline or
ESR releases.

Post by g***@gmail.com
Are there any other Linux specific plug-in plans you can share?

Not really. We want Flash content to continue to display because it's
important to a fairly large set of users, but that's across the board
and not Linux-specific.

--BDS

Christian Rottler

2015-10-09 15:38:09 UTC

Permalink

Hi everybody, are there any plans for the Adobe Reader plugin
("nppdf32.dll" under Windows)?

Quite some of our document workflows rely heavily on this plugin since our
users get to see the metadata of a document alongside the PDF document.
This is achieved by inline rendering instead of spawning a new Reader
window. Furthermore, some (LifeCycle) forms just need Adobe Reader to
render properly / produce the right results / barcodes.

Cheers,
Chris

Benjamin Smedberg

2015-10-09 16:24:10 UTC

Permalink

Post by Christian Rottler
Hi everybody, are there any plans for the Adobe Reader plugin
("nppdf32.dll" under Windows)?

The Acrobat NPAPI plugin will no longer be supported when NPAPI is removed.

Post by Christian Rottler
Quite some of our document workflows rely heavily on this plugin since our
users get to see the metadata of a document alongside the PDF document.
This is achieved by inline rendering instead of spawning a new Reader
window. Furthermore, some (LifeCycle) forms just need Adobe Reader to
render properly / produce the right results / barcodes.

There are multiple options here. You can use pdf.js. If there are
reasons why pdf.js is not sufficient or has bugs, please make sure they
are filed at bugzilla.mozilla.org and let me know the bug numbers. Adobe
also has the option of writing a Firefox extension which renders PDFs
inline.

--BDS

Chris Peterson

2015-10-09 19:37:15 UTC

Permalink

Plugin crashes are underrepresented in crash-stats because Firefox's
plugin crash reporting UI is easy to miss. (It's just a narrow
notification bar at the top of the window.) We have some indications
that only 1% of plugin crash reports are submitted compared to 20% of
Firefox crash reports.