[thelist] flash video and IE7 / IE8

[Barney Carroll]

If you've got Flash working in one instance of IE, you won't be  
needing to (re)install the player to get another instance working. It  
occurs to me one of your IEs is a dodgy version - bear in mind that  
the Trident rendering engine is mostly contained in a specific .dll  
and installing different versions of IE on the same machine will  
result in unreliable rendering behaviour. However this shouldn't even  
be an issue because you can set IE8 to render as 7 - there's a  
rendering option under development tools (F12). Unlike various third  
parties attempts at getting several versions of IE on the same OS,  
this is completely accurate in replicating IE7 down to JS processing,  
and has the advantage of coming with fantastic debugger/DOM inspector.

If you are (rightly) concerned about user experience on pages  
featuring Flash you should provide alternative content, even if that  
content is just 'your browser isn't rendering Flash - you can get the  
plugin here'. As you say, getting a blank box with a red X is crap for  
everyone. There's a decent JS method for injecting Flash if it's  
available called SWFobject you might be interested in. Don't have the  
link to hand but a quick search should through up the right results.

Regards,
Barney


Sent from my iPod

On 4 Mar 2010, at 21:28, Bob Meetin <bobm at dottedi.biz> wrote:

> Lee Kowalkowski wrote:
>> On 4 March 2010 18:08, Bob Meetin <bobm at dottedi.biz> wrote:
>>
>>> These are true vanilla installs of IE7 and IE8;  it will commonly  
>>> say
>>> something like with no addons, blah...
>> I could have the wrong end of the stick here.  Do you mean the
>> shortcut to launch IE that you're using says something like "Internet
>> Explorer (no addons)"?  This is basically safe-mode for Internet
>> Explorer.  Users would not usually be running IE in this mode, if  
>> they
>> were, they would expect flash to be unavailable as you describe.  You
>> need to launch IE normally (without the additional arguments  
>> specified
>> by the no addons shortcut).
>>
>>
>
> That might be the problem - excuse me, is part of the problem.  I  
> rarely use the windows computer excepting for testing how a website  
> looks in either IE7 or IE8 (I have it set up to boot in Linux,  
> windows with IE7 or windows with IE8).  I'm rather ignorant when it  
> comes to Windows.
>
> In IE8 I ignored that shortcut and used the desktop IE menu item as  
> you suggest  and it now works.
> However in IE7 it won't cut me any slack.  I ignored the link which  
> was saved on the desktop and in the start list, went to the desktop  
> menu and ran IE from there.  When it launches it doesn't say  
> anything about with no add-ons, looks normal.
>
> However, the video does not display.  If I move the cursor above  
> where it should display I see the hover over border suggesting it  
> exists and the tooltip that says, "Click to activate and use this  
> control".  Clicking on it does nothing and even if it did it would  
> be horribly counter intuitive.
>
> Certainly I could go to abobe and download flash player (if that is  
> the problem) but again, not an intuitive solution.
>
> Over, Bob
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