Plugins:Information Interviews Summary

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Core Needs

  • Long and short-term plan/roadmap
  • Better data about plugin versions (updates and access to user's plugins)
  • Better update process

Solutions/Ideas

  • Roadmap - long and short term plan
  • Get plugin vendors to contact us about updates
  • Get navigator.plugins.version into all browsers
  • Agree on common version format (major, minor, dot, release, etc)
  • Poll plugin vendor apis for updates to plugins
  • Update manager for plugins in Firefox
  • Download installers for plugins in Firefox and run them
  • Move update checker to plugins.mozilla.org
  • Move PFS2 to AMO
  • Deprecate PFS

Open questions and bugs

  • Linux FF has empty version #
  • Adobe Reader doesn't look up to date according to newer update pings
  • Director/Shockwave not detected properly
  • What does original versus * mean for detection
  • Should we re-open PFS2
  • Java bugs

Problems

  • Lack of direction/plan
  • Manual updating of plugin info
  • Blocklist is overused
  • Inconsistency in plugin name/description
  • mozilla.com update break plugin checker
  • No 'plugins' person
  • Poor l10n planning/coordination
  • Not enough resources
  • Only FF has the version attribute in navigator.plugins
  • Partial version #'s in plugin info
  • Scaling for Firefox 4
  • Users don't update often enough or fast enough
  • Costs vendors $$ to update users
  • No priority of plugins
  • Plugin checker is FF centric
  • Cross-browser problems with IE 7/8
  • PFS is becoming obsolete
  • One version of blacklist for all FF versions
  • No tracking of referrers for plugin checker page
  • Updating plugins is complicated and manual
  • Blocklist has ugly UI
  • No one follows PFS policy
  • No test process for updates to version #'s on plugin checker
  • Vendors want in on PFS and PFS2, currently no process or blocked