1091998 - wsj.com/video thinks that Firefox can't play HTML5 video

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

STR:
1. Disable the Flash plugin
2. Load http://www.wsj.com/video/

RESULT:
"Sorry, your browser does not appear to support HTML5 video playback. You will need the flash plugin installed to view this video."

I can reproduce this with Firefox 33 and Nightly 36 on OS X 10.10.

Is this a problem playing H.264 video or a bug in the website's video support detection?

Comment 1

[Brian Mastenbrook]

I just ran into this, and it's an evangelism bug. Using User Agent Switcher to pretend to be IE 11 results in working HTML5 video. From their script:

            var is_firefox = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf('firefox') > -1;
...

            if(!canPlay || is_firefox){ // if firefox or cannot play, display message.

Comment 2

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Thanks for debugging, Brian!

Comment 3

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

In a few different places in http://video-api.wsj.com/api-video/player/js/wsjvideo.min.js they're sniffing for "firefox" in the UA string to serve flash or show the "Sorry, your browser does not appear to support HTML5 video playback" message.

@Karl, can we reach out to them to ask why they think that? This may be related to not shipping mp4 playback on Mac in stable, but that's just a guess.

Comment 5

[Mike Taylor [:miketaylr]]

Bug 1112579 was reported for Firefox for Android. Installing Flash on a phone is sort of impossible these days. :/