1.8.755.3 forgets plugin disabled state. Can't permanently disable flash anymore!
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When I disable a plugin in snapshot 1.8.755.3 on vivaldi://plugins (like flash and widevine), they are again enabled after restarting Vivaldi. This means I can no longer completely disable flash!!
I hope this is a bug in Vivaldi and not related to recent Chrome versions having lost this ability (https://betanews.com/2017/01/30/chrome-57-plugins/) -
Same on Linux. Unfortunately, this breaks audio playback for me on at least one site that I visit quite frequently (http://www.deutschlandfunk.de). Until one of the last 1.7 snapshots, audio playback on that site would just work if the Flash plugin was disabled (if enabled, attempting to listen to something just does nothing). Now, I need to disable the plugin again every time Vivaldi is restarted.
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Although the flash plugin still appears to be enabled you'll find that flash is globally blocked now by looking at the setting
vivaldi://chrome/settings/search#flash
(hit the "content settings button and scroll down to flash)You can then allow/disallow flash on a per site basis by clicking on the icon in the left side of the address bar.
For a site I visit, I also need to enable the setting "prefer-html-over-flash" in vivaldi://flags to get an alternative non-flash player.
chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash
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This was unfortunately a change that Google made and that Vivaldi inherited. To give you some background, the Plugins UI was created back in the day when plugins were an essential part of the web experience. However, today, Google Chrome ships with only 3 plugins (Flash, Widevine CDM, and the PDF viewer), and NPAPI (Netscape) plugins are no longer supported. Furthermore, Google now considers Widevine and the PDF viewer to be components of Chrome, not "true" plugins, leaving Flash as the lone external non-Google component. As a result, they made the decision to remove chrome://plugins with the intention to control Flash through a dedicated UI.
Here are some of the relevant bugs with more information:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=615738
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=673199
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=654731Google initially planned to dump chrome://plugins in one fell swoop. Then they decided to do it in two phases: Midway through the Chrome 56 cycle, in Chrome 56.0.2924.87, Google engineers suddenly (and unexpectedly) removed the user-facing chrome://plugins UI but left the underlying code compiled into the browser. (We should have seen this change go into Vivaldi 1.7 but the intrepid Vivaldi developers tried to undo it; they successfully reverted the UI change but apparently not the code that reactivates deactivated plugins.) I'm pretty sure that in Chrome 57, Google has completely removed chrome://plugins (UI and underlying code) from the codebase.
I have no idea how Vivaldi will deal with the upcoming changes when they integrate Chromium 57 into v1.8. It doesn't make sense to resurrect chrome://plugins in its entirety, especially if Google decides to make even more changes to how plugins work within the browser. (Eventually, Widevine and the PDF viewer won't even be plugins anymore.) Hopefully Google will develop a better way to control Flash in response to all the negative feedback that they've received so far.
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@CantankRus Wow, thanks a lot,
chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash
helps a lot! I wonder why Flash is preferred over HTML(5) by default. Who'd want that nowadays?@xyzzy Thanks for the background information!
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