tfabris | Adobe Flash Player Bug

Adobe Flash Player Bug

I think I've narrowed down the problem with Flash-based MP3 player applets on our Music Page. At least in my tests, the results are now consistent. I'm confident that Adobe has introduced a bug in recent versions of the Adobe Flash Player. I think I may be the first person to characterize and narrow down this bug with enough detail for them to be able to do something useful with it.

The problem is only if you are on Firefox, only if you are on Windows, only if you have version 9.0.115.0 or 9.0.124.0 of the Adobe Flash Plugin installed (124 happens to be the latest and greatest as of this writing), and only with pages built a certain very specific way. If you're the type who likes to poke around at someone else's bugs, have a look here and let me know if you get the same issues.

I've submitted this as a bug to Adobe, but that was just through their ~~dev/null redirector~~ web form, so who knows if they'll respond. Anyone got any contacts at Adobe?

Edit: I think I've implemented a reasonable work-around. If you still can't play the sound clips on our Music Page, please let me know in comments to this thread.

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You need to talk to

devospice and

budsharpe. :)

I've looked at their LJs and web sites. The Possible Oscar web site is particularly nice, and comes the closest to what I'm looking for in terms of a media player (although doesn't quite fulfill my needs). What specifically did you have in mind by referring me to them?

They both are well aware of that bug, is all, and how to get around it. :)

Oh awesome! Thanks!

In the meantime, I've managed my own work-around that I think I like. Bascially I just replace the Flash buttons with download link buttons when I'm in a situation where the bug would arise.

Man, that Possible Oscar site is the business in terms of web design and attractiveness.

Since the problem only happens when there are more than umpteen flash objects on the same page, you could, for now, put up alternative pages which split your music into smaller groups (e.g., one page per album).

That's already been suggested to me in another forum. I'd prefer not to go that route, even if temporarily. It's an important point for me that all of our songs be no more than one click away from the home page. Having to navigate multiple levels deep into a web site to get to somebody's primary sales item is not a good way to make sales. I'm trying to go by the Coulton model of hierarchy (and intend to expand my site to include even more of the features that have made his site so successful).

At 3am last night, I had an idea related to using IE conditional comments combined with the <noembed> tag that might solve the problem 100 percent if I implement it carefully.

OK, data point: Firefox, Flash 9.0.124, Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon does *not* repro (i.e. they play as they should). So apparently this is specific to Windows.

(This is why I don't like proprietary stuff. If this were a Java app, you could fix it yourself. OTOH, Java is a pig and there are multiple implementations of the JVM, causing as many if not more headaches than the multiple standards-compliant-only-no-not-really browsers out there... *sigh*)

Yup, known and expected behavior at this point.

Win XP professional with service pack 2
Flash player installed: Adobe flash player: 9,0,115,0

Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
--> Doesn't work

Safari: 3.1 (525.13.3)
--> Doesn't work

Internet Exploder: 7.0.5730.13
--> Works

Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
Using IE tab plugin (1.3.3.20070528)
--> Works (expected, as it uses the IE API)

Opera: 9.27 Build 8841
--> Doesn't work

Lynx Browser: 2.8.5rel.1
--> Other.

For Lynx I had Expected 'No chance in Hell'. interestingly enough your page rendered quite beautifully, and allowed me do download the sample as MP3, which is now playing in iTunes. ^^
Considering the work you've already done on your site, you might wish to complete the accessibility pointers and give your all links unique names. right now all sample links are called sample, and all lyrics are called lyrics.
It's a different issue I know, but I got stuck in the full accessibility test anyway.

Yeah, I use IE Tab plugin as well for some of my testing. Quite useful, that little thing.

I'm surprised about Windows Safari and Windows Opera, but on the other hand, I don't have those on my system to test, so I'm glad to see this report from you. When they fail, do they fail exactly the same way as Firefox does? In other words, the plugin loads, looks like it'll work, but then sits and spins when you try to play? Perhaps more importantly, do the song files *play* in Safari/Opera on my test pages that render only 13 instances of the plugin?

The Lynx thing is actually part of the problem. My desire is that I want any non-flash browser to have that little alternate download link that you got when using Lynx. In other words, I wanted precisely that user experience to happen.

But you see, that's the heart of the issue. If I didn't care so deeply about making it function that way, then I already have a simple solution to all of this *right now*, which is to enclose an <embed> tag (which inexplicably works around the Adobe Flash bug) within an IE-specific <object classid=...> statement (which works on IE).

It's the tricky issues of working around the cross-browser rendering limitations of things like object and embed tags that prevents me from using that solution. I can't get (at least I haven't yet gotten) a reliable situation where the alternate download text appears in the cases in which I want it to appear *and* simultaneously uses the embed tag as a work around on Firefox.

And let's not even *think* about what happens when we throw *MAC* IE into the mix...

I checked.
With 23 songs, Safari and Opera fail in exactly the same way as Firefox. XPSF just keeps spinning, and Wimpy appears to download the entire sample, but then stays on paused.

With just 13 songs interestingly enough, Safari and Opera work, while my Firefox doesn't

IE works in all 4 situations.

I understand you passion to do it right. I'm a bit of an accessibility geek, which means I try to get everything just right, while still looking spiffy as well.

I asked Halimede, only her eyes got this strange red glow, and there was this feral growl when I suggested it, so I'm afraid I can't give you Mac IE data.

A perfectly reasonable reaction.

Hi Tony,

I updated to to Safari 3.1.1 on Windows XP.
Same Flash player installed: Adobe flash player: 9,0,115,0
This hasn't changed things:

XPSF 23 - Doesn't work

XPSF 13 - Works

Wimpy 23 - Doesn't work

Wimpy 13 - Works

Just for the tally.
Cheers,
Science Vixen

Yup, that's expected behavior there.

I think I'm now at the point where I'm done trying to characterize Adobe's bug, and I've got the work-around in place.

For now, my work-around specifically tests for Flash r115 and r124. If adobe doesn't fix it before their next release, then I'll need to change it to do a greater-than check instead of a list of two specific versions.

OK, I'll stop spamming you mailbox with updates then. ^^

Did you know you can play multiple tracks at the same time? I think the page is missing just a bit of logic to prevent that

The *page* isn't missing any logic in that respect. I don't have any hooks into the plugin that let me have that level of control over it. That's all on the plugin's side.

For what it's worth, CDBaby (which is using a different plugin than I am) behaves exactly the same way.

Just out of curiosity, have you tried a page with iframes?
I know they are accessibility hell, but I'm quite interested whether you could load 2 sets of 13 this way.

Hm. Interesting idea. I'll give that a shot.

I sincerely doubt it'll work, since, iFrame or not, everything is rendered on the same page, and I'm willing to bet that Adobe's bug is somehow related specifically to that.

But it's worth a shot and should only take me a few minutes to try out. Thanks for the suggestion.

Nope. Sit'n'spin happens when I iFrame the last 10 within a page containing the first 13.

Was worth a try though, and worth it to confirm my suspicions and is worth adding to my bug page.

Interesting, because I thought the frames got rendered separately.
Back to the old drawing board.

Your workaround works for me.
Have you put an upper level on the flash plug-in (i.e. does it only test for versions between 9.0.115.0 and 9.0.124.0) or do you catch anything above 9.0.115.0?

There is of course no guarantee that the next version will be just as buggy, but if it does work, it would be nice to use it.

It's funny that you were typing this just as I was responding with this very information in my other post.

Right now it checks for those two specific versions. Not because I wanted to leave the hole for the possibility of the next build working, but rather, because the greater-than check is harder to implement in Javascript. I may have found some regexp code that does it correctly, so I've got that tucked aside in case I need to implement it on the next Flash release.

Yeah, that's me multitasking. ^^

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Adobe Flash Player Bug

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Update for Safari 3.1.1

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iframes?

Re: iframes?

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Re: iframes?

Flash testing

Re: Flash testing

Re: Flash testing