Wednesday, 30 April 2014

Good bye Totem browser plugin

10 years ago, I committed the first version of a browser plugin in Totem's source code tree. Today, it's going away.

The landscape of video on the Web changed, then changed back again, and web technologies have moved on. We've witnessed:

  • The fall of RealPlayer
  • The rise of Flash video players, as a way to turn videos into black boxes with minimal "copy protection" (cf. "YouTube downloader" in your favourite search engine)
  • The rise and precipitous fall of Silverlight (with only a handful of websites, ever, or still, using it)
  • And most importantly, the advent of HTML5's <video> tag
Totem's browser plugin did as good a job as it could mimicking legacy web browser plugins from other platforms, such as QuickTime or Windows Media Player (even we stopped caring about the RealPlayer mimicking).

It wasn't helped by the ill-defined Netscape Plugin APIs (NPAPI) which meant that we never knew whether we'd receive a stream for the video we were about to play, or maybe not at all, and when you request one, you'd get one automatic one and the one you requested, or whether it would download empty files. Or we couldn't tell to open in another application when clicking directly on a file. All in all, pretty dire.

We made attempts at replacing the Flash plugin for playing back videos, but the NPAPI meant that we needed to handle everything or nothing. Ideally, we'd have been able to tell the browser to use our browser plugin for websites that we could support through libquvi, and either fallback to a placeholder or the real Flash plugin for other cases. NPAPI didn't allow us to do that.

The current state of media playback in browsers on Linux is such that:
Given all this, and the facts that Totem's browser plugin will not work on Wayland (it uses XEmbed to slot into the browser UI), that its UI is pretty broken since the redesign of the main player (not unfixable, but time consuming), and that it does not work properly in GNOME's own web browser (due to bad interactions between Clutter and GL acceleration in WebKit), I think it's time to call it a day.

Good bye Totem browser plugin.

I'll miss the clever puns of your compatibility plugins (Real Player/Complex and QuickTime/NarrowSpace being the best ones). I won't miss interacting with ill-defined APIs and buggy implementations.
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6 comments:

  1. Anonymous30 April 2014 at 12:42

    Thank you for all the work you did. It was certainly a wonderful plugin.

    ReplyDelete
  2. whitemice1 May 2014 at 11:23

    Thank you for helping us users mind-the-gap between a web with no multimedia and a web with at least something at least vaguely like a standard. Your work was really appreciated.

    My FF on GNOME `just works` everywhere I go.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ian McKellar1 May 2014 at 15:56

    Good times, good times.

    I have mixed feelings about the end of NPAPI that have been brewing their way into a blog post in my head.

    Thanks for fighting the good fight.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Internet Business Counselors15 June 2015 at 16:13

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Internet Business Counselors15 June 2015 at 16:17

    So now how do I remove it from firefox?
    I have FF 38. When I check if plugins are up to date, it still shows up:
    Unknown Plugins Plugin Action
    Totem (v. )
    The Videos 3.10.1 plugin handles video and audio streams."

    ReplyDelete
  6. Bastien Nocera15 June 2015 at 20:30

    Internet Business Counselors: it's been removed in GNOME 3.12 and newer.

    ReplyDelete