Plugins:Information Interviews Summary

Core Needs

• Plan
• 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