yahoo messenger, flash and internet explorer
April 20th, 2005 by boon
I was mucking around with Yahoo! messenger in the office the whole of last week, trying to figure out why it kept crashing on me (error message threw something related to swflash.ocx, the Flash plugin).
I reinstalled Flash no less than 5 times, but to no avail. I knew that the problem was because Yahoo! Audibles, Avatars and IMvironments make use of that plugin. I even uninstalled ymsgr, tried different builds (1358, 1643, 1750 and the latest 1922 build), but that didn’t help.
I disabled sounds, avatars, IMvironments, everything. That helped a little, for the most part. But it particularly went down anytime mvo tried to message me.
Then I went back and pored over the help pages…
You have an incompattible, or corrupted version of Macromedia Flash player, a free Internet Explorer plugin for playing enhanced multimedia content.
An “Internet Explorer” plugin? I thought it was compatible with almost any browser. Must’ve been a semantic error there (I was using Firefox, of course). And they even spelled incompatible with an extra ‘t’.
However, I did notice a glitch in the matrix. Why did the Flash installer prompt only Firefox as a compatible browser, and not IE too? I decided to open up IE (I was reluctant to do so), and install the Flash plugin using the browser.
That was when I realized that IE has a separate Flash installer from all the other browsers. The standalone Flash installer doesn’t include IE. Somehow, Macromedia (soon to be aquired by Adobe) expects you to install the Flash plugin using the IE browser instead of the standalone installer.
How was I supposed to know Flash wasn’t installed on my IE? And what did that have to do with my Yahoo messenger?!
Well, apparently a lot. Yahoo exclusively makes use of the plugin installed for the IE browser, instead of the plugin installed by the standalone installer. Weird, but true.
Most folks won’t have to go through the same problem I did, because 97% (and decreasing numbers) of the world’s WWW surfers use IE instead of Firefox (or any other browser). But if you happen to be one of them, just try updating your Flash plugin on your IE.
That should solve your buggy ymsgr problems.