[Bug 161818] Re: firefox flash-plugin automatic installation fails on youtube

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Reproduced in Ubuntu 9.10 beta; reopening.

>From the duplicate bug 387444, apparently this is deliberate behavior on
the part of the ubufox developers: YouTube uses the Adobe Flash Player
Detection Kit instead of standard <embed> code, and therefore ubufox
does not put up the plug-in finder bar.

The Canonical Design team has just discussed this. Even if the Adobe
Flash Player Detection Kit is "stupid" as described in bug 387444, we do
not think that merely calling it stupid and doing nothing else is a
reasonable or sustainable approach in the face of YouTube using it. And
the experience of installing Flash via adobe.com is much less obvious or
pleasant (.yum? .tar.gz? .rpm? .deb? .wtf?), and presumably less
updatable too, than the experience of installing it from the Ubuntu (or
Canonical partner) repository via the plug-in finder.

There are several ways this might be fixed.

One way would be to persuade YouTube to switch to standard <embed> code,
like Google Video uses, possibly using the more complex Flash detection
only for browsers where standard <embed> does not produce a reasonable
installation invitation; and to persuade Adobe to change the Flash
Player Detection Kit code accordingly. Have any Ubuntu developers done
anything about this so far? If so, what?

A second way would be to special-case youtube.com video pages so that if
Flash is not installed, the plug-in finder bar appears regardless of
what is actually on the page. Yes, this would be a hack (for example, it
would produce false positives if YouTube adopted HTML5 <video>), but no
more of a hack than Safari's special-casing of youtube.com pages on an
iPhone.

A third way would be for ubufox to patch the Firefox code that is
triggered by the Adobe Flash Player Detection Kit, to pretend that the
Flash plug-in is installed regardless of whether it actually is. Again,
this would be a hack, but it would continue in a grand tradition of Web
browsers pretending they do or don't support particular things for Web
site compatibility.

** Changed in: ubufox (Ubuntu)
       Status: Invalid => Confirmed

** Description changed:

- Binary package hint: flashplugin-nonfree
+ Problem occurs with:
+ * Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
+ * Ubuntu 9.04
+ * Ubuntu Karmic, all updates installed
  
- It seems that some users are having problems with the automatic
- installation of firefox extensions such as flash, in specific sites such
- as youtube. These sites query firefox about the availability of the
- flash plugin, and if not found, redirect the user to a proprietary
- "download adobe flash" page, instead of serving the page with the flash
- object which would trigger the automatic flash installation.
+ 1. From a fresh Ubuntu installation, go to <http://www.youtube.com/>.
+ 2. Go to any of the videos.
+ 
+ What happens: "Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player."
+ What should happen: Firefox's plug-in finder bar appears.
+ 
+ Sites like YouTube query firefox about the availability of the flash
+ plugin, and if not found, redirect the user to a proprietary "download
+ adobe flash" page, instead of serving the page with the flash object
+ which would trigger the automatic flash installation.
  
  A simple solution might be to hack firefox to always provide the
  information that the flash capability is present, even when the flash
  plugin is not yet installed. Therefore, the site would provide the flash
  object, and the automatic flash plugin installation would kick in.
- 
  
  More details in the discussion at http://lwn.net/Articles/256641/#Comments
  Some quotes:
  "Firefox Extension Issues
  
  Posted Nov 1, 2007 18:40 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
  http://lwn.net/Articles/256788/
  
  If you visit a site with flash and you don't have a flash plugin available, then the 7.10
  version of Ubuntu Firefox will offer to download and install the Ubuntu plugin.  I've seen
  this work: you get a nice little dialog asking you if you want to use the non-free Adobe
  plugin, or the new GNU flash plugin.  It then asks for your password (for sudo) and installs
  using the graphical installer.  All is goodness and magic.
- 
- Similarly, when I tried to play an mp3 file using gstreamer, it detected that I didn't have
- the right codecs etc and offered to install them for me.  All was goodness there as well.
- 
+ ...
  Unfortunately, all is not ALWAYS goodness.  In the flash plugin case, the problem is that some
  websites can detect that you don't have the correct plugin and if they do, they'll throw up
  their OWN "install flash" site; that's what YouTube does and that's what you ran into.  This
  obviously does not use Ubuntu's package installer, since you're installing from Adobe.  It's
  not clear how Ubuntu could solve this, because Firefox makes a request for the page and the
  page that comes back makes no mention of wanting to run a flash applet; rather it contains a
  button to install flash from Adobe.  Maybe Firefox could be set to "cheat" and reply that it
  does have flash available, even if that plugin was not installed, so that servers would serve
  up flash content rather than suggesting you install the plugin.  The bad news is that probably
  75% of the flash-enabled sites I use now have this special "install the plugin" code.  I
  actually had to wander the web for quite a while looking for sites that contained flash but
- DIDN'T have this special handling, so I could see the new Firefox automatic plugin install.
- 
- For the mp3 case, the problem is not all applications are properly enabled.  Gstreamer is,
- but, for example, I moved over all my music files into my new account and open Rhythmbox to
- scan them all before I installed the mp3 support.  The Ogg files were detected just fine but
- rather than noticing my mp3 files would need a new codec and offering to install it, Rhythmbox
- just marked them all as "failed".  This is unfortunate, but you have to start somewhere.  I'm
- sure the Ubuntu folks are working on getting more tools integrated with the auto-install
- features."
+ DIDN'T have this special handling, so I could see the new Firefox automatic plugin install."

-- 
firefox flash-plugin automatic installation fails on youtube
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/161818
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