An annoying and long-lived bug is preventing some users from viewing Web videos. There’s a workaround, but for many, the cure is as naughty as the disease.

The bug is that Flash videos don’t play for convinced Firefox 3 users on Windows XP or Vista, when using the current Flash player version 9. On YouTube, CNET TV, and other sites, embedded videos will start, but they halt after two seconds. Both Mozilla and Adobe have been aware of the issue since late May, but as yet no solution has been found. For some society suffering from that bug, it’s intermittent. For others, it’s a consistent block to viewing online videos.

One workaround solution is install the Flash 10 player, which is still in beta. Unfortunately, many Flash video sites don’t recognize that Flash 10 is a valid and current player. CNN, for example, thinks Flash 10 beta is older than Flash 8, asks users to upgrade to Flash 9, and thus won’t play at all.

Since the bug is serious and has been known for some moment, I called both Mozilla and Adobe to see what’s going on. I spoke first with Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s “phenomenologist,” a.k.a head of user experience. He pointed me to the record in Bugzilla where they’re tracking the issue and gave me some of the issues they think are responsible for that one. In a nutshell, Mozilla thinks there’s a miscommunication within plugin and browser but doesn’t know which product is the culprit.

He additionally took a minute to trumpet Mozilla’s open-source philosophy. Since Firefox’s cipher is open, Adobe can

look at it and try to determine what is going on. But Mozilla’s team can’t look into Flash. Beltzner didn’t blame Adobe for the bug itself, but he did say that Adobe’s traditional closed software architecture is slowing down their examination. “We hit a wall when it’s a closed-source solution,” he said.

An Adobe spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said Adobe is looking into the issue but isn’t yet certain whether the problem is lonely to Firefox 3 and Flash 9, or whether there is a third culprit — another plugin, perhaps — that is throwing things off for the Flash player.

Finger pointing is common in software troubleshooting, and I give both Mozilla and Adobe credit for only generally waving, not pointing, their fingers at each other. Unfortunately, neither team seems to have developers who can reproduce that issue, which just keeps the ping-pong game going.

What I find most interesting is the way the differing philosophies of Mozilla and Adobe are slowing down resolution of that issue. whether both companies were open thereupon any developer — at Mozilla, Adobe, or elsewhere — could get into things and start experimenting to find a fix. whether both companies had closed philosophies thereupon their engineers could swear each other to the secrecy, swap source cipher, and together fix the issue. But right now I get the sense that the two very different companies simply are not meshing well. And considering of that, I can’t play my videos.

Flash 9 works just fine in World Wide Web Explorer.

See additionally: Two quick fixes for Firefox 3.

Original post by Rafe Needleman