Flash Fails To Break Out Of Firefox
I don’t know if I’m repeating myself here or not, but Primera Technology, Inc., has a problem with its current sweepstakes promotion for the Bravo SE CD/DVD duplicator. If you use Firefox, you might get the impression you cannot enter the sweepstakes due to a flaw in the program. Well, that’s not entirely true, but it’s close enough.
To enter the competition, you have to watch a little Flash video (or start a little Flash video and go get coffee, if you’re like me). When it finishes, you get two options: See if you’re a winner! or Play the video again! If you’re in Firefox and you click the first, which most will, you get:
The status bar says it’s waiting for information; however, that information never gets there. Note the other end of the status bar: the pop-up blocker icon. If you haven’t turned off the message at the top of the browser window, it looks like this:
What’s happened here is that the Flash application has called for a new window, and Firefox thinks the page is trying to open a pop-under ad, so it blocks them. No matter how many times I tell these guys, you’ve got to make sure that your gee-whizzery with non-HTML or non-JavaScript technology that opens a new window doesn’t get shot down like an ICBM over the pole (or we hope an ICBM over the pole would be shot down).
But who cares, really? I know how to work around these things, and your broken software improves my odds of winning.