567856 - Flashblock displays a play button for "empty" Flash content

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: Annoyance Blocking, defect)

Description

[Pierre Rudloff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en; rv:1.9.2.5pre) Gecko/20100520 Camino/2.1a1pre (like Firefox/3.6.5pre)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en; rv:1.9.2.5pre) Gecko/20100520 Camino/2.1a1pre (like Firefox/3.6.5pre)

Some websites like Newgrounds uses empty 1px-large SWF.
Flashblock display a several px-large box around them which sometimes breaks the layout.
There is no need to display this arrow, since the animation is empty.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Pierre Rudloff]

Attachment: Testcase

Comment 3

[Stuart Morgan]

Oops, reading fail; I thought this was just a double-submit.

Comment 4

[philippe (part-time)]

Well, for a starter those 1px-large swf files are not 'empty':
1. it could be a placeholder movie that loads/changes following user interaction elsewhere on the page
2. it could be a swf file that (pre)fetches data to allow other elements on the page to work
3. it could be a tracker swf file (data mining), see bug 512141 for examples.
4. it could be a sound file (http://www.google.com/pacman/ uses one like that, although it is invisible, placed offscreen - with my normal setup, I didn't/couldn't 'enjoy' the sound)

(and there are probably a variety of other similar scenarios)

In all those cases, blocking them without displaying the Flashblock placeholder can prevent correct page behaviour. On the other hand, not blocking them allows the flash movie to load and initialize, eventually against the wishes of the user. For example, those tracker movies are blocked and don't do anything unless unblocked, which is OK for my purposes.

I think this is a can't fix bug.

Comment 5

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Philip, this seems like something we've talked about before, but I don't see any obvious Camino bugs where we might have had the conversation.  Am I correct in assuming that the Flashblock position is more or less what philippe enumerated in comment 4?

Comment 6

[Philip Chee]

Yes these 1px (or 1px) flash objects are either flash web-bugs or increasingly used by AJAX heavy webpages as a cross browser and cross platform XHR engine. So they are only using the Flash APIs for network transport but not the Flash UI. This is an abuse of Flash (presentation) by lazy web developers but we can't stop them.

Blocking these objects without giving the user the ability to discover *and* unblock them only causes more support traffic. Also we very early on deliberately decided to make flash web bugs visible breaking layout for similar discovery reasons. Since this was a concious design decision by previous flashblock project owners (e.g. ted@mozilla) I am disinclined to change this.

Comment 7

[philippe (part-time)]

Thanks, Philip.

WONTFIX then per comment 4 and 6.