416480 - Flash <object>s served as image/swf do not display

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 395110

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Gunnlaugur Thor Briem]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9b3) Gecko/2008020514 Firefox/3.0b3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9b3) Gecko/2008020514 Firefox/3.0b3

See the accompanying URL, which embeds two identical .swf files, one served with Content-Type: image/swf and the other served with Content-Type: application/x-shockwave-flash. The latter object displays correctly, the former does not (it just shows the replacement image).

Since image/swf is not an official MIME type, this may be strictly "correct" behavior ... but Flash objects served as image/swf worked in previous versions of Firefox, and in Internet Explorer, and apparently some sites do serve Flash this way. From the user's POV this change constitutes a regression. So if support for that is to be dropped, it should at least be done consciously. A search of Bugzilla did not turn up signs of that change being conscious, hence this bug report.

Originally encountered on http://www.updown.com/displayProfile.do but that's behind a login (free though) and also serves only the image/swf variety, so I made the test page to simplify reproduction.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://fugato.net/firefoxflashtest/index.html
2. Observe that the first chart does not display, while the second does
3. Ruminate
Actual Results:  
The Flash file served as image/swf does not display; instead, the replacement image is shown. The Flash file served as application/x-shockwave-flash does display.

Expected Results:  
I expected both Flash files to display, as is the case in previous versions of Firefox and current versions of Internet Explorer.

Running on Vista 64-bit, though this almost certainly does not matter.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

The change in bug 1156 made Firefox care about MIME types.