622038 - Infinite SWF download on auto-refresh page with Flash

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Isriya Paireepairit]

Summary: Since Firefox Mobile can't display Flash and try to download .swf file instead, on the auto-refresh web page with Flash object, Firefox will download .swf file infinitely if the web page left opened.

Step to reproduce:

- Open Firefox Mobile
- Go to livescore.com
- Wait and see the infinite download loop everytime the web site is auto-refreshed.

Firefox Mobile 4.0 Beta 3 on Samsung Galaxy Tab with Android 2.2

Comment 1

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

We shouldn't be allowing users to download flash since it's not enable-able on Fennec.

Comment 2

[Alon Zakai (:azakai)]

Do we really not want to allow downloading Flash? Flash might be run in a standalone player. This is what happens on a Galaxy S and on Linux desktop.

Comment 3

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

aakash, can you still reproduce this?

Comment 4

[Alon Zakai (:azakai)]

The situation is this: The page has a Flash element in it that seems to do nothing. That is, when loaded in the stock browser (not Fennec), you get the symbol for a Flash element, but nothing runs.

In Fennec, we pass off the Flash element to the Android native Flash app. That app appears and shows the same Flash symbol.

I think Fennec is doing the best it can at this point - we pass off Flash to the native Flash app. Currently the Flash doesn't actually do anything useful, but if it were working, this would be the proper behavior - since Fennec doesn't have the capability to run embedded Flash (due to multiprocess issues and so forth).

There is the other issue of the loop - apparently the page auto-refreshes itself, which leads to the Flash being reloaded, which leads to us re-launching the native Flash app. This is not good behavior, but I do not see what we can do to fix it. We don't want to block downloading Flash altogether because it is the right behavior in other cases. We could, perhaps, add an option to block Flash downloads after they happen more than a certain amount of times - like, say, we do for alert()s. This seems to be a very rare situation, though, so I recommend that we pass on doing anything here for now.

Feel free to reopen if my analysis here is wrong somehow and there is something better we should do.