Mozillazine is advertising the use of a leak causing exten..

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squall_leonhart
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Mozillazine is advertising the use of a leak causing exten..

Post by squall_leonhart »

the mozillazine wiki for the WMP plugin has this

Windows 7 users can also install the HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in for Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 4.0 Beta. This extension automatically creates a C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\plugins folder and places the file "np-mswmp.dll" in that location; however, at time of writing, this extension is not compatible with Firefox 4.0. [8] [9]


However, this extension from release has caused firefox to consume massive amounts of memory whilst sitting idle and no fixed version has been provided since.
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Re: Mozillazine is advertising the use of a leak causing ext

Post by DanRaisch »

Moving to Firefox General as this has nothing to do with the forum itself.
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Re: Mozillazine is advertising the use of a leak causing ext

Post by patrickjdempsey »

Shouldn't this be a KB request?
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Re: Mozillazine is advertising the use of a leak causing ext

Post by Alice »

I edited http://kb.mozillazine.org/Windows_Media_Player#Installing_the_new_plugin based on the above information, to add a warning that the HTML 5 extension can cause memory issues.
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Re: Mozillazine is advertising the use of a leak causing ext

Post by squall_leonhart »

its not a matter of can, its a matter of how bad. :x
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Re: Mozillazine is advertising the use of a leak causing ext

Post by VanillaMozilla »

Sqaull_leonhart, I don't know whether recent versions of WMP plugin are leaky or not, but there's one small distinction that should be made here. WMP is a plugin, not an extension. They are fundamentally different types of software. Plugins are separate programs that are started by Firefox, and may run within a Firefox window. Mozilla cannot control how plugins are written. Firefox has no control over plugins, except to determine whether they are allowed to run. Extensions are third-party software that actually modify Firefox itself. WMP is a plugin, not an extension.

I suspect you may be right about the memory leak, as I have seen massive leaks in the past when using this plugin. Have you filed a bug report, or is there one already?
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Re: Mozillazine is advertising the use of a leak causing ext

Post by Alice »

VanillaMozilla, see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Windows_Media ... new_plugin which links to the HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in - it's the extension that is said to cause a memory leak.
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Re: Mozillazine is advertising the use of a leak causing ext

Post by VanillaMozilla »

:oops: Yes, I see. It's not only mentioned in the first post, but in your post and the KB article as well.
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Re: Mozillazine is advertising the use of a leak causing ext

Post by squall_leonhart »

VanillaMozilla wrote:Sqaull_leonhart, I don't know whether recent versions of WMP plugin are leaky or not, but there's one small distinction that should be made here. WMP is a plugin, not an extension. They are fundamentally different types of software. Plugins are separate programs that are started by Firefox, and may run within a Firefox window. Mozilla cannot control how plugins are written. Firefox has no control over plugins, except to determine whether they are allowed to run. Extensions are third-party software that actually modify Firefox itself. WMP is a plugin, not an extension.

I suspect you may be right about the memory leak, as I have seen massive leaks in the past when using this plugin. Have you filed a bug report, or is there one already?


Yeah, the HTML5 video extension is a wrapper to the np-mswmp.dll (Microsoft® Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin).

The Plugin itself does not cause memory issues because its not constantly loaded and runs in plugincontainer by default.

The Extension is constantly checking the content for html5 video tags, so it can be played back with the WMP plugin.

left on a blank tab, this extension can cause leak to 2GB in the space of 6 hours.

I've actually opened a bug to have the extension blocked on Firefox 5+
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