GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 726326
Unwarranted packagekit dialogs popping up
Last modified: 2017-01-21 03:48:20 UTC
Trying Epiphany 3.11.91, packagekit is popping up dialogs while I am browsing common websites (in my case it was Google Docs, although I think I have seen this in other sites). This is a really bad first impression for a new user: * They are a surprising interruption. * It isn't clear why the dialog popped up. * The dialog is full of technical mumbo jumbo (see the screenshot). * They don't actually work - if I search they don't find anything. * They don't actually seem to be needed - I can view the page just fine without them. If there is video on the page that requires a codec that isn't present, the best thing to do would be to superimpose a message over the media itself. Or an infobar could possibly be used for other types of media. Either way, it isn't clear to me how these dialogs are helpful, and since they seem to be triggered without good cause, I wonder if they could simply be disabled for 3.12.
Created attachment 271870 [details] screenshot
In practice, every distribution that includes encumbered codecs (i.e. everything not Red Hat or SUSE) installs all the important ones (e.g. MP3, H.264) by default. This dialog is only helpful if the user is smart enough to figure out how to enable RPM Fusion or Pacman, but not smart enough to install the codec himself. That's a limited set of users, and it does not justify the very high annoyance level of these dialogs. Possible improvements without rearchitecting anything: PackageKit could be smart enough to know that if the search failed in the past, it's going to continue to fail in the future, and so display the message only once. Or we could run the search in the background, and display the message only if the codec is found. On the other hand, perhaps an info bar would be sufficiently unobtrusive and informative that it would be OK to show each time. Certainly a message superimposed over the video would be, but that doesn't work well for audio codecs.
(In reply to comment #2) > Or we > could run the search in the background, and display the message only if the > codec is found. That was a bad idea since the search could take a long time.
Ideally you would show something inside the web view like Firefox does. Something in the corner that you might need to install something to experience the full website, but not getting into the way of the user. This would probably need to be done inside WebKit with a hint to Epiphany. And only after that you would call into the GStreamer codec installation magic. Which might or might not find something. And if it does not find something, the PackageKit part could point the user to a) an explanation of the messed up situation with codecs, and b) to places where they can get codecs for their distribution. IIRC on Ubuntu at some point the last part was implemented in the codec installer, but that was pre-PackageKit. It also had a button in the dialog to enable the enable the Ubuntu "multiverse" repository (after warning the user about potential consequences), which basically contained every codec you would want. Note that all this is not great user experience either, but I don't think there's anything better we can do without fixing society first.
This was fixed in WebKit a while back.