Unexpected behaviour - embedded Flash abc.net.au

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Giorgio Maone
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Re: Unexpected behaviour - embedded Flash abc.net.au

Post by Giorgio Maone »

On behalf of someone else:
unnamed wrote: V 1.9.9.14 the behaviour around swf files remains as reported in the OP.
The surrogate script makes no difference to the behaviour.

Further unexpected behaviour from the same site:

(abc.net.au whitelisted, apply these restrictions to whitelisted)
No specific example can be given because the front page story on http://www.abc.net.au/news changes rapidly, and I am unable to supply screenshots at the moment.
However there is another variation on the swf "Video" placeholder (the chevron button goes with all these kinds of links) within a story, where selecting an .asx link gives several different and unsuccessful responses.
Audo is unaffected and link selection for audio gives expected player display and audio file playing.

These .asx links either give zero change when clicked, or open a blank page in the same tab, or open a placeholder with the label <EMBED>, video/x-ms-asf - which when allowed produces zero change - no embedded media plays. Of course the video in these links *can* be downloaded for playing externally to Firefox in players with net browsers.
These variations can also be reproduced, but not predictably, when embedding restrictions are removed from whitelisted. If the user navigates to the site without restrictions on embeddings, then most of the time these embedded videos, with chevron buttons, play as expected when the links are selected. Toggling the embeddings permission once the user is already at the site can produce variable results - - ? caching.
This is Australia's public broadcaster's site. It's the most used one aside from the usual USA hegemons.

Given the variable results, and lack of ability in our group in testing them to exhaustion, the way these links are presented in the stories, and indeed throughout the site, is effectively acting as content blocking without any input needed from NS, and as things stand, efficient browsing of the abc.net.au/news site is now only possible with all embeddings allowed. Our Western Australian group has voted to add one more request for an embeddings whitelist as a very desirable development in NS, and has adopted the workaround meanwhile of either creating a separate profile with embeddings allowed on whitelisted to browse abc.net.au/news, or toggling prefs to this before navigating there, and with any luck remembering to toggle them back when leaving ;-)

Thanks for your attention :-) I regret being unable to follow this post with any responses, so I hope there's enough information for anybody who wants to reproduce it.

the poster formerly known as... :lol:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091016 Firefox/3.5.4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
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