Improved missing plugin experience

Status

Team

Open issues/risks

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Stage 1: Definition

1. Feature overview

Our current experience when a plugin is missing is pretty abysmal, and rarely works for anything else than a very small set of plugins. We want to fix the experience for the small set of plugins that have a lot of users, and stop pretending to supply an auto-detect service for the others.

This feature falls primarily in the Experience category (from the "Discover, Experience, and Connect" vision statement.)

2. Users & use cases

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3. Dependencies

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4. Requirements

• Ability to detect and point to relevant locations for the major plugins
  • PFS does this
• Mozilla needs to host permanent redirect URLs for this, so we can change quickly, should downstream providers suddenly change their URLs or similar
  • PFS basically does this.
• bug 268936 - It should be possible to say "Don't ask me to install this plugin again"
• We should never imply that installing a plugin is absolutely necessary for the browser to function (like we kind of do today), but rather that plugins are required for certain types of content
• bug 678707 - We should label which plugins you'll end up downloading/installing in the location where we show the "Missing Plugin" message. Right now, you don't know until you go ahead and start the process
• bug 264254 (essentially WONTFIX) - We want to stop using Plugin Finder Service, and instead hardcode the small list of plugins we care about to simplify the code and maintenance burden
  • We are maintaining plugin data for plugincheck anyways

Non-goals

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Stage 2: Design

5. Functional specification

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6. User experience design

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Stage 3: Planning

7. Implementation plan

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8. Reviews

Security review

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Privacy review

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Localization review

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Accessibility

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Quality Assurance review

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Operations review

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Stage 4: Development

9. Implementation

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Stage 5: Release

10. Landing criteria

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Feature details

Team status notes