Heads-up: unshipping plugin-container in Firefox 119 (Linux/Unix but not Mac or Windows)

[Jed Davis]

Firefox on Linux/Unix platforms (but not macOS, or Windows) will no longer ship the plugin-container executable as of Firefox 119; see bug 1532782.  Before this it was used for GeckoMediaPlugins (GMP), but now the firefox executable itself is used for all process types.  The plugin-container executable is still built and is still used by xpcshell; this could change in the future but there are no current plans there.

Most users and developers shouldn't need to care about this, and it won't be visible to Web content as far as I know.  Distributors / packagers may need to care; I'm planning to contact the maintainers of some downstream packages directly.

Thunderbird can probably do the same thing as Firefox here but I'm not as familiar with it; I've let the TB devs know so they can look into that.

(About other OSes: On macOS we always use a separate .app bundle for child processes to deal with some Mac-specific requirements.  On Windows we still use plugin-container.exe for GMP and previously used it for NPAPI plugins; I'm not aware of any plans to change that.)

--Jed