Java plugin installer is confusing

Bug #320989 reported by numerodix
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
firefox (Ubuntu)
New
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

The attachment shows the dialog the user gets when he doesn't have a java plugin installed (screenshot attached to this bug report). This dialog is confusing from a user's perspective.

   1. While it’s great that you help me install the plugin, I have no idea what all these things are. All I wanted was “java”.
   2. There is no “default” or “recommended” choice. I can see that one of them is selected, but for all I know that’s because the choices showed up in this order at random.
   3. Even if I were inclined to think that the selected choice is selected for a reason, there’s another choice that’s exactly the same.
   4. “No description found in plugin database.” is not exactly helpful. In fact, it could be just the thing to help me here.
   5. If I wing it and install one of these, and then it turns out it doesn’t work (perish the thought!), the little notification at the top of the web page isn’t going to show up again (because a java plugin, working or not, would be installed). So there’s no way I can come back to this screen.
   6. If I am the kind of user who understands that the choices in this dialog represent packages in the system, then I don’t know what they are called, because the package names are not mentioned. So if I want to uninstall a plugin that doesn’t work, I don’t know what to uninstall.

Revision history for this message
numerodix (numerodix) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Micah Gersten (micahg) wrote :

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 272010, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

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