Flix.co.il is a an Israeli video sharing site, and recently I noticed that when someone links to a movie over there, my Firefox fails to display it, and I have to revert to IE to display. That doesn’t happen that much for me to install the IETab extension. but today, I decided to check what’s going on, and see if a user script can be written to overcome it.
One of the strangest things was that I saw no complaint about it in the Israeli Blogosphere, and I thought that if there was a problem with Firefox support on that site, bloggers would have rant about it, and someone would even write a user script to solve it.
However, when I checked it I found out that the site uses Javascript libraries from plaxo.com when the “send movie to a friend” feature is used, in order to import their address book. Normally, this should not be a problem, but SmartFilter defines Plaxo.com as “Social Networking” and such sites are blocked by our IT people as non-job related site, so when the browser requests it, it gets an error HTML, and if it tries to treat the returned page as JavaScript code, errors occurs. For some reason I didn’t quite understand, IE can cope with that JavaScript error, but Firefox stop execution the code in the page, so the movie Flash <object> and <embed> tags are not created, and the movie is not displayed.
After that was found, it was easy to write a user script that creates that movie Flash <embed> tag if the page failed to do it.
Checking it some more, I saw that if you refresh the page several times the movie start playing. This might be related to the fact that the plaxo.com libraries are loaded in an <iframe>, and the load order might change.
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