We are happy to announce Pipelight 0.2.8 which introduces some new features to increase the compatibility with Firefox. It is highly recommended to install this update since the previous PGP key which was used to sign the plugin database (install-dependency) expires on the 14th of december and otherwise you'll not be able to update plugins anymore after this date.
The last release was quite some time ago since the NPAPI translation layer is mostly feature complete and most of the bugs are caused by Wine and not Pipelight itself. We therefore spent most of the time working on Wine and our project Wine Staging which became the default Wine version on Fedora.
As a result of Chromes deprecation of NPAPI, Firefox became the main target for Pipelight and we started to workaround some Firefox quirks (like the plugin information cache). In future versions we also plan to provide a "pipelight-browser" which consists of a set of browser extensions and scripts to provide a pre-configured Firefox profile for an optimal Pipelight experience. The aim is to make everything configurable through Firefox without the need of using terminal commands. In order to achieve this, we need to rewrite some code parts and Pipelight 0.2.8 will be the last version before the rewrite. The changes already included in this release are shown in the following overview.
The pipelight-plugin --update command will now automatically update the timestamps of the plugin libraries in order to force Firefox to refresh the plugin information. This is essential to make Firefox show the correct version number of a plugin. Calling pipelight-plugin --create-mozilla-plugins, as it was necessary in older Pipelight versions, is no longer required.
From time to time it happens that the initialization of a plugin fails, mostly during a Wine update, causing Pipelight to return "pipelight-error" as plugin name, mimetype etc. If Firefox caches these invalid values, you still won't be able to use the plugin after a browser restart although everything is functional again. In order to prevent this problem, Pipelight now saves the plugin values during a successful initialization and will fallback to these values in case of a failure. The plugin won't work and you will get an error message when you try to use it, but Firefox won't cache invalid values any more and a browser restart is usually sufficient to fix the problem.
The following plugins have been updated:
- Update Flash to 16.0.0.235
- Update Silverlight to 5.1.30514.0
- Update Adobe Reader to 11.0.08
- Update Shockwave to 12.1.5.155
- Update Unity3D checksums
- Update Foxit PDF Reader to 7.0.6.1126 (broken in Wine 1.7.32)
- Update Roblox checksums (broken in Wine 1.7.32)
- Remove TrianglePlayer plugin (the game using it does not exist anymore)
Remember that you can always use the --update command to get the most recent plugin versions without waiting for the next Pipelight release.
If you want to see all the changes in detail please take a look at the the full changelog:
https://bitbucket.org/mmueller2012/pipelight/raw/master/debian/changelog
