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Before we close this fascinating portion of our narrative, we must add one more reason to specify the player via the <pluginspage> attribute: If you don’t, the browser will choose one for you, often with hideous results. Read on.
The iron-plated sound console from Hell
Right up through its 4.0 browser, Netscape used to respond to WAV, AIFF, AU, and other traditional sound file formats by sprouting an ugly little console. But the console did not simply leap up and start playing. Oh, no. Nor was the console actually part of Netscape’s browser, even though it was the default player. For reasons we can only guess at, Netscape chose Java as the foundation for the console.
When you encountered a site that contained a sound, the page would stop loading, and the browser would seem to freeze. In the status bar, the dreaded words “Starting Java…” would appear. After a Vietnam-like eternity, the ugly console would at last pop up and blast the stupid sound.
Now, suppose you did not feel like waiting for this mockery of a sham to run its course. Suppose you attempted to close the browser window or navigate to a previously visited site via the Back button. What would happen then? The browser would crash, of course.
If most people did not detest embedded sound files to begin with, this tragicomic exercise in non-user-centric design certainly encouraged them to think of embedded sounds as one of Satan’s more diabolical efforts.
THE TROUBLE WITH PLUG-INS
While providing the visitor with linkage to the appropriate plug-ins page is certainly a friendlier gesture than simply abandoning her to chance, most professionals try to go one step further. They try to hide all the technological complexity from their users. Even something as simple as navigating to a plug-ins page can confuse and frustrate some users.
382 HOW: Beyond Text/Pictures: The Trouble with Plug-ins
To work around this, most developers step in at this point and write a plugin detection script. The theory is simple: If the user has the plug-in, the embedded content plays. If the user lacks the plug-in, some alternative is provided (perhaps something as simple as text). The user is never made to feel inadequate, never made aware that she might be missing something.
It’s a beautiful plan, but as we mentioned in the JavaScript chapter, it has often broken down because plug-in detection is not universally supported.
Netscape, having created JavaScript, has always used it in the browser to detect the presence or absence of plug-ins. Let’s take the Flash plug-in for argument’s sake. If the plug-in is not detected, the visitor might be taken to a page that explains that the site uses Flash and offers her the opportunity to download the plug-in from Macromedia.com, as previously described in “The ‘Automagic Redirect.'”
Because JavaScript was not originally a standard technology, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had to rely on another technique. Prior to IE5, Microsoft used IE-only ActiveX technology to handle plug-in detection.
Before writing plug-in detection scripts, developers had to write browser detection scripts. If the browser was Netscape’s, the JavaScript plug-in detection script ran. If the browser was IE, ActiveX plug-in detection was triggered (and if the plug-in was missing, ActiveX would supply it).
None of this worked on the Macintosh version of Explorer, whose users generally ended up in a hellish loop of nonfunctioning technology and selfcontradictory error messages. This cruel stupidity should not be blamed on the Macintosh Operating System, nor on developers who toiled long and hard to work around browser deficiencies.
IE now supports JavaScript on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms. As users upgrade to new versions of these browsers, these incompatibility problems should become a distant memory.
Yet software developers still sometimes confuse Netscape’s proprietary JavaScript APIs with standard JavaScript. That’s why two plug-ins mentioned earlier in this chapter (Adobe’s SVG plug-in and Thomas Dolby’s Beatnik plug-in) don’t work properly with IE5/Mac.
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And web designers who don’t keep track of the ever-changing browser compatibility scene still make silly mistakes, particularly where IE5/Mac is concerned. For instance, even though IE5/Mac handles plug-in detection
flawlessly, many Flash sites, when they detect the presence of IE on a Mac, refuse to let the user proceed until she has switched to Netscape’s browser. This makes no sense, but it happens all the time.
We fear we are beginning to lose some of you in the back row. Snap out of it. We’re almost done, honest.
If Plug-ins Run Free
Earlier we promised to answer a simple question: Why don’t companies that make plug-ins charge web users to download them? After all, Extensis makes a bundle from its fine Quark and Photoshop plug-ins. Are the makers of the most popular plug-ins (Macromedia, Apple, Real, and Microsoft) simply beautiful altruists who want to teach the world to sing and don’t desire a penny for their efforts?
That was, of course, a rhetorical question.
Companies distribute their plug-ins at no cost because the value of these products is commensurate with their distribution. Put simply, a plug-in that is on 100 million desktops is vastly more valuable than one that is on a million. How do you encourage a person to try something? Let them have it for free.
Indeed, as we’ll see in a moment, companies not only gave stuff away free, they paid other companies to promote their free stuff. Never have so many spent so much to earn so little. (Excluding the browser wars themselves, of course. Those cost even more and made even less.)
Okay, so as a result of giving all this good stuff away for free, Macromedia, Apple, Real, and Microsoft have achieved what they sought: nearly everybody uses their plug-ins. So how do these companies recoup their investment and hopefully even squeeze out a profit?
They do it by creating and selling authoring tools. Web designers buy
Macromedia Flash. Web producers buy Real Producer and professional
QuickTime authoring suites.