Comment 52 for bug 216699

My tests show the problem to be greater than just a failure to update the status bar. The browser is also failing to tell the Flash Player that the file transfer is complete.

We have a Flash Player application that loads a list of files in order, one at a time. When ActionScript recieves a load complete event for one file, it begins loading the next. If we don't receive the load complete event for a file, we cannot know when to load the next. Loading all files simultaneously isn't an option.

We've learned that the problem is intermittent, but haven't seen a pattern of when it occurs. For example, if our list of files was data1.swf, data2.swf, ..., data20.swf, the browser might fail to report that data2.swf complete, when in fact proxies and other monitors show us byte-for-byte that the file did completely deliver to the browser. The browser just fails to tell the player that the load was complete, and the browser's status bar is another visible sign that it failed to recognize when the load completed.

The problem comes and goes with minor versions of Firefox. I don't recall the version when we first saw the problem. Our solution at the time was to have our Flash application retry the load request, but we found that once Firefox began failing on a particular file it would not ever report that file had completely loaded during that session. We could clear the browser's cache and close the browser and the problem would go away, for that file. So, retrying alone was not enough. We resorted to retrying and overriding the browser caching. For example if the request was for data1.swf and Firefox failed to tell us when the transfer was complete, we'd request it again as data1.swf?trycount=1.

Another work-around was to switch users to using https instead of http. When using http, the transferring data status message never hangs and thus the browser ALWAYS tells the player when files have completely loaded. This work-around worked up to Firefox 3.6.10. With Firefox 3.6.10, using https no longer gaurantees that we'll recieve the load complete... and of course the Transferring data status remains on.

Our application runs in a non-tabbed window, but regardless switching tabs only makes the status bar update. It does not cause the browser to tell the player that a load has completed.

I see this as a VERY bad bug, that is costing us and everyone else time and money, and hope that it will be permanently resolved soon.