237459 - usatoday.com - Link to download Flash (where Flash content would be) after a check for Flash, even though flash is installed

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 165538

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Cecelia S]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040313
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040313

When going to a site such as
http://www.usatoday.com/news/graphics/powerfailure/01.htm and
http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/snapshot.htm?section=S&label=2004-01-26-golf&csp=1
, the page reports that Flash isn't installed and provides a link to install it.
Flash is installed and works for many other sites such as http://www.tvland.com .

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to one of the sites listed (or any other's you know of).
2. Wait for flash content to load
Actual Results:  
Flash content doesn't load. Instead you are invited to download the latest
version of the Flash plugin.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla should have reported correctly or faked itself as having the correct
version of Flash installed.

Might be related to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233533

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> http://www.usatoday.com/news/graphics/powerfailure/01.htm

This site simply sends the error page.  Presumably based on some sort of
server-side sniffing.  No way to tell exactly what they screw up, and not much
we can do about it.

>http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/snapshot.htm?section=S&label=2004-01-26-golf&csp=1

This site uses a special syntax for the flash plugin that says that unless you
have the exact ActiveX plugin that IE uses you must not load that content. 
Mozilla does not use the ActiveX flash plugin, so does not load the content. 
Again, nothing we can really do here; the various Flash plugins have slightly
different capabilities, and maybe they're restricting the plugins that they want
rendering their content for a reason (though I rather doubt it, myself).

We should probably evangelize the sites in question to fix their issues.  Please
file a separate bug on the yahoo site.

Comment 2

[Cecelia S]

Sorry about the first link (not exactly what I was trying to portray). Anyway,
the second link works in both Safari and Internet Explorer with the same plug in
(at least for Safari).

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

That's a bug in Safari (and in IE if that's IE/Mac being used).  The HTML spec
is _very_ clear on what the classid attribute means, and this page is requesting
that a specific Windows ActiveX control and absolutely nothing else be used to
render that <object>.

Comment 4

[Felix Miata]

Conforming summary to TFM item 10 at 
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/site/procedures.html#file-new

Comment 5

[OstGote!]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 165538 ***