Ubuntu
flashplugin-nonfree package

  1. Bug #263435
  2. Comment #653

Comment 653 for bug 263435

Revision history for this message
In , Ws-bugzilla (ws-bugzilla) wrote :

WHERE THIS BUG STANDS AS OF TODAY

There is a technical side to this issue: Firefox is technically UNABLE TO FILTER THE KEYS: confirmed in comment #3, comment #27, comment #181, comment #185, comment #627 (an explanation rather than a confirmation). The hundreds of comments asking Firefox to "just" filter some keys (often going to a lot of specifics) can only be useful once Firefox can intercept plugin keys - which it can't, see bug 788718.

Mozilla has always wanted to fix this bug by changing the plugin API to allow plugins to send back "unused" keys. This is confirmed in comment #188, comment #315, comment #337. Last time this has been confirmed is end of 2009. There have been a few specific proposals: comment #236, comment #269. But, possibly due to the sheer scale of this work, it has not been completed, and seems more unlikely than ever before.

In comment #487, a patch was proposed by Josh Aas from Mozilla which filters what events plugins see, thus departing from the "let's fix the plugin API" approach. The patch was Linux only. This appears to confirm that at least some people at Mozilla are OK with the "filter the keys" approach. There are other linux-only work-arounds: comment #260, comment #385.

There have been some attempts at fixing the bug by providing a way to unfocus the plugin, sidestepping Firefox's inability to filter keys before the plugin sees them: comment #303, comment #308 and my own comment #446 (in which I failed to actually figure out a way to unfocus the plugin - the fact that the plugin captures all keys was not a problem because I used an OS-wide keyboard hook).

Mozilla is asking for patches, but it's been a while since comment #337 and it's no longer entirely clear whether a patch filtering the keys would still be rejected outright. A comment in bug 788718 from someone at Mozilla would clear up this uncertainty.

There is a bounty standing at $164 as of today on this bug: comment #334.

P.S. I shall be bold now and update the whiteboard to point to this comment. The point of this post is to compensate for Bugzilla's lack of a comment voting feature, making the above comments get lost in the noise, and since comment 403 has been repeatedly called "outdated".