FireFox issue when testing locally with Ariaware Optimizer

If you've been following the comments at Burak's blog you may be wondering about the issue raised by Versus regarding Ariaware Optimizer:

"I've tested trial on all of my projects. And so called "optimized" swf work only with Internet Explorer, but not Firefox (Mozilla)."

Straight off the bat, we need to lay this rumour to rest:

This issue only comes into play when testing an optimized application locally and it does not affect deployed applications. There are no known incompatibilities with deployed applications/sites and FireFox or any other browsers.

Applications and web sites optimized with Ariaware Optimizer will work on all browsers that the application or site worked on prior to optimization and that includes FireFox.

That said, there is and issue and we've been able to narrow it down to a bug with the way applications/sites are optimized when the "Locally, for testing" option is selected in the General Settings screen. This does not affect applications when they are being optimized for deployment using the real deployment URL of the shared classes.

The development team is hard at work on fixing the issue with applications optimized for local testing and we hope to have an update posted for download very soon. In the meanwhile, the workaround when testing locally is to use either the authoring player, standalone Flash Player or Internet Explorer.

We've just updated the Online Support page on the Ariaware Optimizer web site with an update on this issue:

"We've become aware of an issue that affects applications optimized with the "Locally, for testing" option in the General Settings screen. There is currently a bug that prevents the local testing of these applications in the FireFox browser. The issue does not affect deployed applications and there are no known incompatibilities with deployed applications/sites and FireFox or any other browsers. We are currently very close to having a comprehensive fix for this and will be releasing an update soon. In the meanwhile, please use either the authoring player, standalone Flash Player or Internet Explorer for your local testing of optimized applications/sites."

Update (13 Oct, 2004 - 8pm)

The issue mentioned here appears to be a Flash/Mozilla incompatibility issue related to Mozilla-based browsers not being able to handle spaces in file names.We are still looking into it to see if we can find a workaround but it appears that either Flash or Mozilla core (or both) may need to be updated. Macromedia has a tech-note related to this on their web site. Since Macromedia's tech-note dates from 16 April, 1999 this appears to be a long-standing issue.

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