Opt-in activation for plugins: Difference between revisions

|Feature open issues and risks=* What type of UX to have for allowing users to opt in (or out) of enabling plugins on a (semi)persistent basis?  See below in "Use Cases".

* Where are the preferences to require click to play for all or specific plugins?  Where are the preferences to have separate plugin permissions per-site?

* What warnings show up when a user wants to enable an out of date plugin?  What does the UX of the "scary warning" look like?  Do we direct users to the plugin check website as part of the warning?  Do we have two levels of warnings (scary and really scary) and what would they look like?

* Adverse reactions between content plugin sniffing and click-to-play

** Bsmedberg asks in bug 711552: "Are we exposing to the DOM that a particular plugin element (<object> or <embed> is user-disabled?) This seems important for websites that rely primarily on plugins (e.g. Pandora) so that they can show alternate UI (plugins are disabled, please click to play) instead of timing out and showing a generic "please install Flash" or "Song initialization timed out, please hit refresh" UI."

** Can content differentiate between "click to play" and "hard-disabled for security reasons"?

* Risk of clickjacking - is this something we should try to mitigate ?

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

# Performance: Plugins consume significant resources, both individually (i.e. Java starting because a given page requested it), and in aggregate (i.e. Flash consuming 30% of the CPU because of many ads and movies)

Chrome has implemented something similar: http://blog.chromium.org/2011/03/mini-newsletter-from-your-google-chrome.html

|Feature users and use cases=Use cases with '''proposed interactions below emphasized''':

#* User cannot run plugin or

#* '''User can run plugin after scary warning'''

#* '''User is prompted to open plugin-check/update page, but can run plugin after scary warning instead'''

#* '''User can right click on the overlay and check an option to always allow this specific out-of-date version on the specific domain.'''

#* Jruderman has suggested a context menu instead of a click - this is a mitigation against click jacking.  Could provide "Now/Always/Never" choices.

# A web page has multiple instances of a plugin that requires click to play

|Feature dependencies=* UX design/review  

* Revisions to blocklisting (or at least re-purposing of existing mechanisms)

* Integration with plugin updating

|Feature requirements=Core requirements

* Reduce resource consumption by plugins

Optional requirements

* Control plugins on a per-plugin basis for a given site

* Mitigate attacks where user interacts with site (clickjacking, or simply wants to run vulnerable plugin)

|Feature functional spec=Phase 1:

Phase 2:

Phase 3:

Users can turn on preferences to require click to play for specific plugins.

(Note that we may allow vendors a few days or a week to update their users before remotely requiring click to play on a plugin.  This will depend on the severity of the vulnerabilities in the plugin.). The plugin blocklist may also be used in some cases, as it recently was to block widespread exploitation of Java.

Visible plugins will have a chrome-privileged overlay that users will click on to activate the plugin. Invisible (or barely visible) plugins will cause an infobar to appear to enable all plugins on the page.

|Feature implementation notes=Meta bug for the work is {{bug|738698}}

and {{bug|730318}} 'Opt-in activated plugins should use internal APIs to keep track of plugin activation'.

{{bug|742753}} concerns only playing the instance of the plugin that has actually been clicked and also about some of the problems involved with 'invisible'/helper content - this has some prior history as well due to problems encountered when implementing click to play in Fennec.

}}

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