Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> writes:
Hi, I am planning to propose blacklisting the GNOME browser plugin in WebKit, because it has been causing crashes and hangs for several years, and we don't know how to fix it. My recent commit apparently didn't help; when we do WebKit updates in Fedora, users regularly complain in the comments that extensions.gnome.org still causes crashes or hangs, and we hear this on IRC often as well. I'm planning to propose making this change effective in WebKitGTK+ 2.12 (March 2016), so there is time to migrate to something else, but not time to keep ignoring the issue. Ideally we would not need to do this, and either fix or delete the plugin in gnome-shell instead.
Are those bugs in WebKit or the plugin itself?
This only matters for users running under X11; users running under Wayland already have no support for NPAPI plugins. Since we're planning to switch to Wayland by default in Fedora 24, this change would have no impact on Fedora users: extensions.gnome.org will be broken there (in Epiphany) no matter what.
The gnome-shell plugin doesn't implement NPP_SetWindow(), so I don't see anything incompatible with wayland. I guess we disable plugins at runtime in WebKitGTK+ when connected to a wayland display, but that's something we can change.
Of course, it's bad to break extensions.gnome.org by blacklisting the plugin, but I'd rather the site be totally broken but Epiphany stable than the site work sometimes but crash or hang the web process often. extensions.gnome.org is already broken in Chrome because Chrome got rid of all NPAPI plugins a while back, and it will soon be broken in Firefox because Firefox has decided to ban all except Flash by the end of 2016, so you could see this as incentive to either migrate to something else (it wouldn't be hard to add the plugin code to Epiphany itself, but that won't work for Firefox/Chrome) or shut the thing down before Firefox shuts it down for us.
Of course it would be better to switch to any other thing that works on all browsers, but what?
We're going to continue to support other NPAPI plugins in WebKit indefinitely when running in X11; the GNOME shell plugin is special only because it's installed by default and causing problems for many users.
Let's fix the issues instead, then.
Michael _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
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