Re: FLASH: IE4 on mac/bad detection?

[Colin Moock]

flashershocker [dot] com

,Internet writes:

>I have repeated this problem on 3 Mac machines here at work all running

>IE4

>with the latest Flash plugins (V.3r10) installed. The problem is that

>certain Flash  sites are not being recognized. The result is that we are

>shunted to an html version of the site or the aftershock generated gif

>substitute or nothing at all. The same sites have been tested on

>Netscape4

>and they worked fine.




The problem you're describing is very likely not a bug but rather bad

logic in detection scripts.


Here's a quote from my site on the topic of Flash plug-in detection

that might help (sorry if it wraps badly...):



"We check first to see if the browser's JavaScript supports the

navigator.mimeTypes property using

if(navigator.mimeTypes). By checking this information separately from

our explicit check for the

Flash MIME type, we allow for the possible existence of Flash in

browsers that may not support the

JavaScript we need to detect Flash. Netscape 2.0 is one such browser,

and MSIE 4.0 on Mac is

another. Though the JavaScript in those browsers doesn't include the

mimeType property of navigator,

they can run Flash 3. (Some scripts assume that if the mimeType isn't

set, Flash isn't installed, so they

end up sending users that have Flash to non-flash pages).

Unfortunately, if the mimeType property

doesn't exist, we can't detect Flash. 


So if the browser does support JavaScript, but doesn't support mimeType

detection, we send it to the

"unable to detect Flash" page, and our script's work is done."



The above quote may make more sense in the context of the full article

at:

http://colinmoock.iceinc.com/webdesign/flash/detection/detect2andup.html


I've noticed that many detection scripts seem not to account for all

cases of browser/plugin installation. The fact that most scripts don't

have a page that explains that detection has failed seems to suggest

that many scripts send non-standard browser/platform/plugin

combinations to the wrong place. (You can't always successfully

determine whether or not Flash is installed).


At one point (maybe still?) Macromedia's site also turned down Netscape

2.0 browsers with Flash installed properly.


>If this is a bad script, who is at fault? Is this an IE4 problem? Or

is it a

>Macromedia problem? Until it is fixed it is most definitely a problem

for

>Mac users of IE4.

Well, you might say IE is at fault for not supporting the detection

method. But it's really just typical of web software upgrade processes.

New browsers come out, new plugins come out, designers try to account

for all audiences while playing with the latest toys, but sometimes

they just don't have the resources to test their scripts on Opera for

Windows 3.1 or IE4 for Mac...


Cheers,

Colin (back from vacation)


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