When Markus Mielke wrote that they Improved <object> fallback
I was hoping that they also fixed one very annoying bug related to object element.
Imagine this simple code, used in this example:
<object data="assets/countdown_greatbritain.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="269" height="34"> <param name="quality" value="high" /> <param name="wmode" value="transparent" /> <param name="pluginurl" value="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /> This is where the Flash file would load, but it is intentionally missing. </object>
If the file is not found at that URL, browser will receive 404 — file not found error. It should simply continue with page execution.
Internet Explorer, both 6 and 7, will however continue to “download” this file forever and thus never execute any window.onload code.
I long thought that this is bug in IE’s implementation of object, which was known to be buggy. Since this behavior repeated I started writing this post about IE bug, only to realize that all works as expected when instead of Flash I load QuickTime movie. Or image. Or Word document. Or PDF. Anything except Flash.
This is actually bug in Macromedia’s Adobe’s ActiveX plugin. Adobe, please fix this thing, it’s extremely annoying.
I had this problem with my website and found a graceful way around it. By using the SwfObject http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/ you can set the minimum version for the Flash Player, before the object tag is constructed. If you set the minimum version to 9 it all works well. If you have the proper Flash Player it handles the 404 and if not you can display a message to upgrade.