Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Downloadify Stopped Working in Google Chrome

Downloadify uses Flash's download functionality to enable client side download. It saves server side roundtrip.  There is also nice user extensions using Downloadify to export ExtJS grid on the client side. HTML 5 does have some limited support of client side download, but it suffers inconsistent support between browsers.

Ok, after all the justification for using it, Downloadify stopped working for Google Chrome recently. And here are the observations:
  • Environment: Windows, Google Chrome is up-to-date
  • Download still works in IE and Firefox;
  • Download only works in Chrome if I'm testing using Intranet URL. But it does not work if the URL looks like Internet address (i.e. http://localhost works, but http://10.10.10.1 won't work);
  • IE, Firefox are on Flash 11.3, and Chrome is running Flash 11.4
Solution:
Not really a solution. It's more like a workaround.
  1. In Chrome address bar type: "about:plugins"
  2. Click on "Details" button to expand into more detailed view
  3. Find "Flash" section, and disable the Flash player 11.4 (something called "PepperFlash"\"pepflashplayer.dll")
  4. Make sure there is another Flash player listed here, which should be Adobe's distribution

Root Cause?
I can only guess. Still not sure why and how to fix it properly.
Turns out Google Chrome has it's own Flash distribution. (Only guessing) It seems to be different from Adobe's official one, and somehow has higher default security settings.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi

When i disable player adobe is disabling at the same time

Guogang Hu said...

For your case, you should only click the "Disable" button near the pepperflash player, not the one at the bottom of Flash section.

But, PepperFlash in Chrome seems to be stickier issue since I posted this article. It will be automatically enabled after Chrome restart.