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Thread: Amazon glitch with Firefox

  1. #1
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    Amazon glitch with Firefox

    For the past few days there has been a curious glitch with Amazon's website. When using the Firefox browser, people report they can't see the customer contributed photos on the product pages. People using Internet Explorer or Safari do see them.

    Today I contributed a new photo for a product using Firefox and I can see it with Firefox. But I can't see the photos for other products that used to have a lot of them.

  2. #2
    Conspiracy, definitely a conspiracy. (just joking)

    Firefox does not work with Searchtempest for me, but it does work on Internet explorer.

  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by Stephen Cherry View Post
    Conspiracy, definitely a conspiracy. (just joking)
    But we don't want to miss a good conspiracy!

    One way to see more about the Amazon glitch in Firefox is go to a page where there used to be customer photos, such as http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...?ie=UTF8&psc=1 and change the view by View->Page Style->no style. In the ugly page that results I see some error messages under the manufacturer's product photo where the customer photos used to be. One error says I need to get Flash Player.

    (I also notice on the Adobe Flash Player site that there is a message that says the currently available version of Flash is the last version that will be supported for Linux.

    Quote:

    NOTE: Adobe Flash Player 11.2 will be the last version to target Linux as a supported platform. Adobe will continue to provide security backports to Flash Player 11.2 for Linux.
    Last edited by Stephen Tashiro; 04-29-2013 at 2:43 AM.

  4. #4
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    I see the customer images just fine with Firefox (19.0.2) on Windows 7. I also see the bit about Flash Player when removing the page style, but I'm not convinced that's the issue here.

    On Chrome however (version 26.0.1410.64; also on Windows 7) all I see is the manufacturer's product photo. No option for customer images at all.

    I did not try with IE.
    And there was trouble, taking place...

  5. #5
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    Flash is on its way out, being replaced by HTML5. By all accounts it'll be a slow process though, flash will be probably be required for years yet. Mozilla is working on something they call Shumway that will play flash content using non-Adobe technology. It is still very much in development. Works on some things, doesn't work on others. I wonder if there's an ad blocker, javascript blocker, cookie manager or similar responsible for images not showing up.

    Stephen if you need the latest flash on Linux, Google Chrome (not Chromium) supports something called pepper flash which will install and run the current flash player. You have to disable any other installed flash players. I haven't had the need, 11.2 works fine every place I need it.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by Steve Wurster View Post
    I see the customer images just fine with Firefox (19.0.2) on Windows 7. I also see the bit about Flash Player when removing the page style, but I'm not convinced that's the issue here.
    I think you're right. I fooled around more with my Firefox settings. All plugins I had were disabled. I enabled some and that didn't fix the problem. However, I happened to try Tools->Page Info->Details->View Cookies->Remove All Cookies. I exited and restarted Firefox and I was able to see the customer images.

    I'm not sure yet if the plugins had anything to do with the fix. Perhaps only the cookies need to be refreshed. Or perhaps Amazon coincidentally fixed a problem while I was experimenting.

  7. #7
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    I use Firefox all the time with Amazon. I've not noticed issues with customer submitted images, but I don't pay attention to them. Most of the stuff I've been looking at recently has no customer submitted images. I rarely pay attention to the customer submitted images because most of them add no value.

  8. #8
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    I'm pretty sure Flash has nothing to do with this, since those images are not served up over Flash. I run Flashblock under FF and don't have Amazon on a whitelist, so I would get nothing but the big "play" button if they were coming out over Flash.

    The fact that I don't see the customer images in Chrome tells me Amazon is either using non-standard HTML/CSS for those images (and without any Google-specific code), or their attempt at using a (potentially browser-specific) standard is broken. Or there's a bug or some other behavior in Chrome that's preventing this. I did not try to clear my cookies in Chrome to see if that would fix the problem.
    And there was trouble, taking place...

  9. #9
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    This evening, I found another amusing "feature" of Amazon customer-contributed-photos software that I might as well report in this thread. Since I can see product photos now, my enthusiasm for contributing returned and I contributed some photos of a post jack http://www.amazon.com/Vestil-FJB-16-...cmu_pg__header However, in trying to submit or edit captions to some of the photos, I had problems because my captions completely vanished after I clicked on "save".

    After much experimentation, I discovered that any caption I submitted that contained the word "seller's" vanished. Even the one-word caption "seller's" vanishes. I contented myself with not using that word and finished the task.

    I wonder whether the word "seller's" triggers some automatic rejection of the caption or wheter it merely triggers a delay in the caption being posted while the matter is referred to some human evaluator.

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