So I’ve spent a good part of the last week trying to develop a workaround for the horrendous Service Pack 2 Download Blocker. The download blocker is essentially designed to alert users when a page starts to download on its own (when they didn’t click a button to start the download). The problem I’ve found is that for applications built entirely in Flash, like our jsymmetry app… IE does not consistently detect clicks that take place inside of Flash.
On occasion, when a user clicks a download button in a Flash app, IE doesn’t detect the click and flags the download as suspicious. The real problem occurs when IE tries to determine what to do when the user chooses to accept the download. For lack of a better solution, IE refreshes the page. Of course, this doesn’t work for a Flash app.
On jsymmetry, every time this occurred, it booted people from the site and brought them back to the login page. Huge problem. So… my workaround entailed the following:
- Detect every click on a download button
- Store the timestamp and the file_id in a shared object
- If the page refreshes within a certain number of seconds, log the user back in automatically by reading the shared object
- Take the user directly back to the file they clicked on
- Show the user an info box that tells them how to avoid this problem in the future
The easiest way I can find to stop the download blocker is to add the URL to the “Trusted Sites” list in the IE :: Tools > Internet Options > Security > Trusted Sites > Add
I am imagining many Flash developers out there right now wringing their hands over this latest implementation by Microsoft. It just seems like shoddy work on their part to not have worked with Macromedia to make sure they could detect mouse clicks 100% of the time.
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Comments ( 3 )
Hmm, but this is the first post I recall reading about “intermittent XP2 permission to download executables from click in SWF” problems… I can’t find a match for the symptom in the Macromedia portal page on SP2 either:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/service/servicepack2.htmlCan you also achieve this intermittent behavior in a new, bare, simple file? If so, then could I ask you to contact Macromedia Tech Support with it so that we can repro, log, and diagnose it too…?
tx,
jd/mm
John Dowdell added these pithy words on
Dec 09 04 at
5:51 pm
I did a little more research to see if I could determine any specific cause from my app that is making this occur. But being that I’ve been researching this all week, I found nothing new. The only thing I did consider last night is that the problem seems to occur much more frequently on the client port we did of jsymmetry at https://www.novoengineering.com/admin. There are 2 differences technically between that site and ours: 1) That site runs entirely through SSL, and 2) The interface is a frameset, so the Flash file you are clicking on is in a nested frame.
I have tried testing this out with a plain vanilla SWF in a frameset and via http, but I can’t get the problem to occur right now.
But the problem does occur… very infrequently… on jsymmetry as well. And that’s the main problem… I can’t determine when or why this problem happens and it happens intermittently.
One caveat… I am able to consistently make the problem occur on the novo admin dev site with a particular file I am attempting to download… IE throws the error every time.
I’ll keep looking for anything to report to MM, but I’m not sure yet.
Jay added these pithy words on
Dec 10 04 at
9:55 am
Understood, those intermittent symptoms are the hardest to diagnose, because it’s harder to be sure we’ve found the key ingredients….
John Dowdell added these pithy words on
Dec 10 04 at
3:56 pm