246543 - news0r.com - Firefox display an arbitrary Flash file rather than expected Flash file on webpage.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English Other, defect)

Description

[tom gordon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0

The default page at www.news0r.com has an inline Macromedia Flash ad as well as 
one Flash banner (which doesn't always display). The source for this inline ad 
(this is hardcoded into the HTML as is not a dynamic object) is
/images/ads/babel/sponsorshipbar-WIN1000-UK.swf

Firefox actually displays the following file (which is a valid Flash file, but 
is added dynamically by the website ad manager roughly one time in 10. All 
other times standard animated banners are displayed.)
/images/ads/tm_banner_ad.swf

When this ad file is displayed in the top section of the website, it uses the 
settings for the inline Flash ad (the hardcoded one) and breaks the rendering 
of the entire website.

When the TM banner ad is displayed, the flash embedding code is dynamically 
added to the page. At all other times, this Flash ad is NOT displayed, is not 
reference, and the object code is not placed into the page source.

Firefox however has decided that this is the only Flash object that can be 
displayed on the page, despite the page explicitly referencing a *different* 
SWF file.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load www.news0r.com
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
It displayed the Flash file http://www.news0r.com/images/ads/tm_banner_ad.swf 
inline amongst the news stories.

Expected Results:  
It should have displayed http://www.news0r.com/images/ads/babel/sponsorshipbar-
WIN1000-UK.swf inline amongst the news stories.

Comment 1

[PikeUK]

Inline Ad
---------

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,29,0"
width="565" height="39">
    <param name="movie" value="/images/ads/babel/sponsorshipbar-WIN1000-UK.swf">
    <param name="quality" value="high">
    <embed src="/images/ads/tm_banner_ad.swf" quality="high"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="565" height="39"></embed>
</object>

That's the code from the inline Flash ad, as you can see it uses the common
technique of putting an <embed> inside an <object>. The <object> is linked via
an ActiveX classid (and thus, in general, is only viewable in Internet
Explorer), most other browsers will fallback to the nested <embed>, which as you
can see has its src attribute pointing to the Trackmania ad rather than to the
Transformers ad.

Stretched Banner
----------------

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,29,0"
width="468" height="60">
    <param name="movie" value="/images/ads/tm_banner_ad.swf">
    <param name="quality" value="high">
    <embed src="/images/ads/tm_banner_ad.swf" quality="high"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="120" height="600"></embed>
</object>

This time both the <object> and the <embed> point to the same file but the
<embed> has a width of 120px and a height of 600px (compared to 480px and 60px
respectively in the <object>) thus causing the broken layout.

This is a problem with the ad code on your site not Firefox, moving to Tech
Evangelism.

p.s. Great site BTW been reading it since the BW news page went.

Comment 2

[PikeUK]

No Flash ads on page anymore, closing bug.