There is something very wrong with this screenshot/scene


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Funny. I actually got a call tonight from my brother in-law complaining that he couldn't get Flash to work in Win7. I had to redirect him to installing the appropriate Firefox plug-in. Apparently, it's not that obvious, since he's an IT major. Although he majored in web development, I still found it amusing. :p

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I don't understand why some of the posters above get so upset? I simply reported something which I believe to be wrong hence "The Beta Discussion" forum.

I believe some of you get the wrong picture here.

The chances are if Adobe's web site uses some type of technique to detect user's browser, other web sites might be using the same technique too and all of them will be broken. You fail to think outside the square.

As a quality assurance agent, there is no way this will go beyond me and will have to be fixed in order to maintain 100% compatibility. If this does not get fixed and gets released like this, many web sites (that use the same technique) will be broken but I guess you don't care about it so that's fine for you but not for the rest of the world.

I don't think you quite understand what is happening. All browsers send the version of the operating system they're running on to sites you view. If you are running Vista, your browser will send "Windows NT 6.0". If you are running 7, it will send "Windows NT 6.1". This is a browser feature and has nothing to do with Windows.

Whether the website chooses to use this information for anything is up to it. In Adobe's case they use it to send you to the download page for a version of Flash that has been thoroughly tested with your operating system and known to work. If there isn't a tested version for your OS, it sends you to the manual download page, where it's up to you to find something that might work even though it hasn't been tested and is unsupported.

When Adobe has completed their testing and has a product ready that they know works with Windows 7 and officially support on that platform, they will update the site so that it also recognizes it. You can be sure that this will be done in time for the release six months from now.

This is completely unproblematic and not an issue at all, and is in fact the normal way of doing things. You seem to believe that this is some sort of critical bug in Windows that has to be fixed, which is just nonsense. What would you like Microsoft to do? Change the version number of Windows 7 to be the same as Vista? Include a shim that patches Firefox to claim its running on Vista even though it isn't, thus changing the functionality of a third-party product? Come on, be sensible.

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It's actually not a problem with Windows 7. Most websites when checking a visitor's browser version will look at something called a "user agent" string reported by the browser.

For example:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0) - Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0.7000.0 Beta on Windows 7 Ultimata 64-bit Beta

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SU 3.1; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Tablet PC 2.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022) - Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 - Firefox on Windows Vista

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8 - Firefox on Windows 7

So what's happening here is Adobe has not yet updated the coding on their website (probably some Javascript or maybe some server side code) to recognize the user agent string for Firefox on Windows 7 as being Firefox on Windows 7. Perhaps their code does see that the user is using Windows and makes its guess of Internet Explorer, leaving the option for the user to make a different choice should that have been the wrong assumption.

It is entirely proper that a browser provides accurate information as to it's name, version, and host operating system. (You can download extensions for Firefox to have it report a different user agent string. This is useful in some circumstances when you know what you're doing and why you're doing it--such as fooling a website to use a service with a browser it would otherwise deny service to when you know it will work.)

In this case there is nothing Microsoft could really do to make Firefox report that it is running on a different operating system (apart from Windows telling Firefox that it is actually not Windows 7 but instead Vista--like you might enable using the compatibility mode option Window's had for a while now). This is not really a preferred decision, though. Adobe just needs to update their website. I'm sure they will; it's in their best interest.

edit--Looks like I should have read hdood's post. :)

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can't see why anyone would want to spoof something like this :D

Well, some websites don't work on lesser known browsers like Opera. However, if you change the user string to that of IE or Firefox, the site loads, sometimes perfectly, sometimes not so well.

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