Leopard breaks the Flash Player - the double fix

Apple’s new OS X Leopard causes Adobe’s Flash player to toss its cookies whenever Flash tries to access the local file system in the normal way. The result is that sites with Flash-based file upload tools (like Flickr) are scrambling to figure out how to handle Leopard users in a nice way. Here are two fixes: one for Leopard users, and the other for publishers trying to accommodate Leopard users.

The fix for Leopard users is easy and has been documented in several places online in the last week, including Ars Technica. There’s a special flash player update from Adobe labs that you can download here (you’ll want to click “Download Plugin for Mac OS X 10.2 and above”). Adobe does recommend that you use their Flash player uninstaller before you run the update. After you complete the update, your Flash player version should be at least 9.0.98.

One applicable bit of trivia: my friend just purchased a Macbook with Leopard preinstalled. His version 9.0.47 of the Flash player worked normally. I’m guessing that Flash player version 9.0.47 is only breaking down when users upgrade to Leopard from an older version of OS X.

The fix for publishers is a little more involved. You need to detect Leopard users and then help them get the special Flash player update they need. I’m going to use Faceplanting, my recently launched online game as an example. Faceplanting uses Flash in two separate places. First, there’s the “Make” page where you upload your picture and create your own Faceplanting page. Second, there’s the actual Faceplanting page where you and your friends morph (aka Faceplant) your face, and save the results. This second page is unaffected by the clash between Leopard and Flash. For instance, if you visit George Bush’s Faceplanting page without the special Flash player update I mentioned above, you’ll see it works just fine.

It’s only the Flash-based file upload functionality on the “Make” page that needs special attention. I used javascript to detect OS X users that have a Flash player version lower than 9.0.98, but I didn’t want to redirect them, I just wanted to show a small message near that top that greets them with a link to the fix.

Here’s the rub: there’s absolutely no way to detect if the OS X user is on Leopard or not. This is because the user agent reported in the browser has no special version, it just reports “Mac OS X” whether that user is on Leopard or an older version of OS X. So the best I could do was add a linked message that says “Howdy Mac Lover! If you’re using Leopard, you may need a special upgrade for your flash player.” I had this message link to an upgrade page which walks people through upgrading their Flash.

My javascript is in a file called leopardtest.js and I added it to the html of the Make page where I wanted the alert message to show up. You’ll notice that my script taps into the functionality of SWFObject 1.5, which is the most widely used tool for embedding Adobe Flash content. This means I also needed to include swfobject.js in the Make page head so its functions would be available to my leopardtest.js (I already had swfobject.js in there because I was using it to embed the page’s flash content).

To see how the working code looks, view the browser source of Faceplanting’s Make page. You can also go straight to the leopardtest.js.

About this entry

Author: JontheWayne

Published:: November 8, 2007

Category:: Tips

Share this post:

David 12 Nov 07

We installed the fix version of flash, and it introduced some other strange fickle bugs where a whole region of our as3 client doesn’t always show up. Anyone else?

JontheWayne 17 Jan 08

I just found a great article (http://www.colettas.org/?p=204) from one of the creators of Buzzword, the flash-based online word processor. Buzzword requires Flash player 9, except sometimes users need a newer minor version (like 9.0.47) depending on what their operating system and browser is.

Side note: theoretically all the OSes should require the same minor version for a given flash app. Unfortunately, the minor versions don’t work perfectly cross-platform. Adobe has fixed the bugs with minor version updates, but that just means you have to do a bit of client side detection to figure out if the user really needs to upgrade. Honestly, Adobe has been sloppy. Developers shouldn’t have to be juggling like this. Hopefully Adobe will test player versions more thoroughly from here on out.

Anyway, the Buzzword peeps made a javascript-based fine-grained flash detection and installation system that’s worth taking a look at. It covers all the major operating systems and browsers. It’s not packaged up for reuse, but you can check their javascript source code to see what they’re doing.

Also, here’s another post from the same guy about his run-in with the file upload problem: http://www.colettas.org/?p=200

In regard to Leopard users, he says Buzzword is requiring them to have what he calls “Player Update 3″. This has since been released as official player version 9.0.115.

The cool thing about it being an official release instead of a lab release version is that Flash’s auto upgrade feature can grab this new version automatically.

This means I will need to change the js script I made in this post. No longer do I need to send Leopard users to a special page of instructions.

For my Faceplanting app, I will still need some custom js on the “make” page (where you upload a pic for Faceplanting). I’m using SWFObject, which is nice, but it doesn’t have a facility for saying, “require at least 9.0.47 for Windows users and 9.0.98 for Leopard users.”

I’m updating Faceplanting over the next couple weeks, so when I get that done, I’m going to go through and test it with all the different minor versions of Flash Player 9 (on all the different operating systems) to see what minor version is required where for full functionality. Currently, it requires at least 9.0.47, but I’m even hoping I can let Windows users through with 9.0.28 or even 9.0.0. We’ll see.

In the end, I will probably end up using a bit of the detection code Buzzword has set up. I’ll probably mix that with swfobject. I’ll keep you posted. My whole goal is to make as few users as possible upgrade and to give those few an automatic experience.

Side note: It looks like the page I was pointing Leopard users to in my js script has moved. The updated flash plugin for Leopard users is no longer in the labs area. It’s an official release which can be found here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash

But like I said, I’m not going to make people go to Adobe’s website to upgrade. I’m going to use the built-in upgrade mechanism Flash has (makes updating very easy for users).

I emailed David Coletta, the guy who wrote the posts about Flash and Buzzword that I linked to in my previous comment. I wanted to know how they managed to differentiate between Tiger and Leopard in JavaScript (I don’t think it’s possible).

His reply:

“It turned out that we didn’t need to differentiate between Tiger and Leopard in JavaScript. After I wrote that post, Apple released 10.5.1, which also contains the fix to the FileReference bug in the player, so it turned out that Leopard was basically ok again.”

This is really great. It means Tiger and Leopard users don’t need to upgrade to the latest minor version of Flash player 9! This means 8 out of 100 people visiting their Flash site will no longer have to upgrade Flash!

And here I was blaming Adobe all this time.

Thanks David!

Leopard breaks the Flash Player - the double fix

About this entry

3 Comments

Have your say

Archives

Our Projects

About Phoenomi