1158788 - [e10s] Add-ons cannot load plugins in the main process in Nightly

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Extension Compatibility, defect)

Description

[patwonder]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150413143743

Steps to reproduce:

1. Install Fire IE on latest e10s-enabled Nightly: https://addons.mozilla.org/zh-CN/firefox/addon/fire-ie/.
2. After restarting Nightly, a pop-up shows up saying the "Fire IE DLL" is not loaded.
3. Attempting to load any sites in IE engine results in a page that says "Fire IE DLL" plugin is disabled, even if the plugin is set to "Always Activate" in the Add-ons Manager.

The cause is the patch in comment #8 of bug 1155976. It affects add-ons that bundles plugins with them, e.g. the IE Tab family (IE Tab, IE Tab V2, Fire IE, China Online Banking Assistant, etc.). These add-ons typically uses a container page (that always loads in the main process) to host a full page IE plugin to display web content. The patch disables the ability to load plugins in the main process, thus breaking these add-ons badly.

As Jim Mathies [:jimm] said the patch is going to stay. Could we at least whitelist plugins that are bundled with add-ons, or simply have an entry in about:config to override the patch?


Actual results:

Fire IE DLL plugin fails to load.


Expected results:

Fire IE DLL plugin should be loaded as usual.

Comment 1

[badkins79]

I have this same issue with my extension. My Add-on includes an HTML page that it loads via a chrome:// URI. E10S loads chrome URIs in the UI process. However, this HTML page loads a plugin, and the patch in question stops this from working.

Please allow plugin loading again for pages loaded in the UI process.

Comment 2

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Sorry guys, but this is not going to change, see bug 1194780.

If you would like to discuss it I'd suggest posting to dev.platform.