Why can't they fix the Flash/Firefox bug?
Latest: Adobe's John Dowdell has a thoughtful critique of this post that also expands on the nature of the bug.
An annoying and long-lived bug is preventing some users from viewing Web videos. There's a workaround, but for many, the cure is as bad as the disease.
The bug is that Flash videos don't play for certain Firefox 3 users on Windows XP or Vista, when using the current Flash player version 9. On YouTube, CNET TV, and other sites, embedded videos will start, but they halt after two seconds. Both Mozilla and Adobe have been aware of the issue since late May, but as yet no solution has been found. For some people suffering from this bug, it's intermittent. For others, it's a consistent block to viewing online videos.
One workaround solution is to install the Flash 10 player, which is still in beta. Unfortunately, many Flash video sites don't recognize that Flash 10 is a valid and current player. CNN, for example, thinks Flash 10 beta is older than Flash 8, asks users to upgrade to Flash 9, and thus won't play at all.
The cure is worse than the disease.
Since the bug is serious and has been known for some time, I called both Mozilla and Adobe to see what's going on. I spoke first with Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's "phenomenologist," aka head of user experience. He pointed me to the record in Bugzilla where they're tracking the issue and gave me some of the issues they think are responsible for this one. In a nutshell, Mozilla thinks there's a miscommunication between plug-in and browser but doesn't know which product is the culprit.
He also took a minute to trumpet Mozilla's open-source philosophy. Since Firefox's code is open, Adobe can look at it to try to determine what is going on. But Mozilla's team can't look into Flash. Beltzner didn't blame Adobe for the bug itself, but he did say that Adobe's traditional closed software architecture is slowing down their investigation. "We hit a wall when it's a closed-source solution," he said.
An Adobe spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said Adobe is looking into the issue but isn't yet sure if the problem is isolated to Firefox 3 and Flash 9, or if there is a third culprit--another plug-in, perhaps--that is throwing things off for the Flash player.
Finger pointing is common in software troubleshooting, and I give both Mozilla and Adobe credit for only generally waving, not pointing, their fingers at each other. Unfortunately, neither team seems to have developers who can reproduce this issue, which just keeps the ping-pong game going.
What I find most interesting is the way the differing philosophies of Mozilla and Adobe are slowing down resolution of this issue. If both companies were open then any developer--at Mozilla, Adobe, or elsewhere--could get into things and start experimenting to find a fix. If both companies had closed philosophies then their engineers could swear each other to the secrecy, swap source code, and together fix the issue. But right now I get the sense that the two very different companies simply are not meshing well. And because of that, I can't play my videos.
Flash 9 works just fine in Internet Explorer.
See also: Two quick fixes for Firefox 3.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
To be honest.... on Firefox 2, I had this problem. It turned out that the Flash Player plugin and some of it's registry entries had gotten corrupted. Once I manually removed them (removing EVERY SINGLE REFERENCE to Flash Player in both IE and Firefox from the registry) and then re-installed Flash Player.... the problem was fixed.
I also had the problem creep up on another person's PC, and I installed No-Script to fix the problem. The problem was that on the site where he was trying to watch a flash video, the page was coded wrong and had an erroneous string of .html that Firefox and Flash Player weren't liking, but that IE just ignored.
I'm usually a fan of Mozilla but that answer is complete BS. There are millions of developers debugging around closed source solutions every day,.. i'm one of them. It's the reality of software development and not an excuse for ignoring a serious bug. BOTH Mozilla AND Adobe need to consider this a critical issue but Mozilla have much more to lose since there's no problem with Flash 9 and IE. They need to get over themselves and stop blaming closed-sourcedness. Most commercial software is closed source and for good, solid business reasons.
"If both companies had closed philosophies then their engineers could swear each other to the secrecy, swap source code, and together fix the issue".
Never gonna happen,..even companies which rely on each others support will not do this. I don't care how moral these companies want us to believe they are, it would be like "Attack of the Clones" within weeks!
Further, nobody blamed closed-sourcedness; I merely mentioned that if Flash was open source, we would be able to look deeper into the issue ourselves without having to find a snapshot of a system that's experiencing the problem.
I experienced this problem on Firefox 2 myself for awhile. Then, I totally uninstalled and re-installed Firefox 2, not even saving anything in my profile but my bookmarks and manually deleting my profile.... that solved the problem instantly in one case. When the same problem cropped up a few months later, I uninstalled and re-installed Flash Player.... again, that solved the problem.
My thanks
That'll fix it until it happens again.
This underestimation of the competition and the fact that Adobe not doing everything possible FAST to correct a problem with Flash in the most important open application is going to cost Adobe in many ways.
Lerianis, re your registry changes - I've read forum posts citing a Windows Security update (#896688) which changes registry info in such a way that some ActiveX components no longer display properly on webpages.
I thought this might be the cause of the FF/WMP issues but I can't really ask annoyed end users to go to the bother of checking what their latest security update was to confirm this, and it's a bit tenuous anyway.
There are a number of posts complaining that WMV has vanished since upgrading to FF3 - this one's on the Mozilla forum, and there isn't even an official response: http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=tr&comments_parentId=135328&forumId=1
Personally I don't like that I need to install Flash to begin with. Flash seems bloated.
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200804/050108AdobeOSP.html
Spokesmen speak on the record. If they go off the record, they are no longer spokesmen.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2008/08/firefox_video_dropouts.html
If Adobe can't reproduce it on demand, they really can't fix it because it's otherwise just a shot in the dark on what's causing it and what needs to be done to remove the issue.
I've seen the bug happen myself a couple of times (Windows XP, Firefox 3, Flash Player 9.0.124) but it has not happened very often and is very random in nature.
-
by revtarded
August 28, 2008 11:26 AM PDT
- firefox 3 + winxp sp3 and all works well with flash9. never had even a hiccup and didnt realize this was an issue until i read this story. because of that, i'll buy the errant plug-in combination excuse or the embedded malware excuse since i have no additional plugins installed in firefox other than standard fare media plugins like flash.
-
Reply to this comment
-
See all 67 Comments >>