Shockwave Works In 2000 Compatibility Mode

Hi Ladies & Gentlemen!

Been awhile. For anyone that hasn't been fanaticle about tirelessly searching for how to get Shockwave running on Mozilla with Windows XP, I did the work for you.

The Bugzilla post with several complainers regarding Mozilla has a workaround. Run Mozilla in Windows 2000 compatibility mode and Shockwave will work perfectly. So far it's the only way I've gotten Shockwave working in the later editions of Mozilla since Netscape 7.1 (the first not to work-I think that was Mozilla 1.4).

Don't ask me why, but it works. I've yet to experience any negative effects from running Mozilla this way, but I wish Macromedia or the Mozilla developers would check on this and see if they could fix it so this workaround wouldn't be necessary.

I had given up hope that Shockwave would ever run on Mozilla with XP, so this is great. I wanted to share what I had found out here, as I had posted in the past regarding this problem and we couldn't get it fixed.

 

Hmm... Something must be wrong with your program installation since everyone I know who runs Mozilla based browsers (inlucding Netscape and Firefox) in Windows XP do not have any problems with the Shockwave plugin.

 

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for the feedback. You have a good memory as that older thread on Shockwave was back in 2002!

Glad you got it working.

Ramona

 

Saiyan,

Heh. Check bugzilla and you'll notice several threads regarding Shockwave problems. How many installations do I need to see where Shockwave works fine with 98, but not in XP (except in IE). Well, now that the folks at Bugzilla have discovered the workaround to the bug that effects many perfect installation of Shockwave, XP, and Mozilla, we're all set running it in 2000 Compatibility mode.

Everyone's tried running the Shockwave uninstall from add/remove, using the Macromedia Shockwave installer, reinstalling with the full installer packages, adding Mozilla and Firebird entries to the registry, etc, etc...

Nothing had solved the bug until someone stumbled onto running Mozilla in 2000 Compatibility mode.

Are you sure you're giving professional tech advice by telling people their system's messed up before researching and noticing this is a known problem? It sounds like standard training for tech support people, though, so I forgive!

Have a beer and forget!

 

I have no problem with Mozilla1.6 and 1.7, but have had problems with Netscape7.1. I will try the change, and give the details, if it works.

 

In that case I must have misssed all those threads about Shockwave and WinXP. I did a search on forums.mozillazine.org (the premier Mozilla support forum) and found a few threads about Shockwave and WinXP. After reading those threads, it looks like the issue is registry/installation related.

I probably skipped all those threads before because I don't have the problem. Furthermore, I have installed Mozilla, Netscape 7, and Firebox on over 20 computers running WinXP for my friends and none of them ever had problems with the Shockwave plugins.

Since I only found a few threads about Shockwave and Win XP problem on Mozillazine so I am not sure how wide spread the problem is. I also did a search on bugzilla.mozill.org and found no problem reported to be specific to Win XP though some of the bugs were reported by users running NT 5.1 (aka Win XP).

Do you have the bug ID from bugzilla.mozilla.org so I can read exactly what the problem is?

 

Well, there was a long, old Bugzilla noting the problems a couple of years ago. The one I found the fix on was reached through http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/important.html#shockwave

That was the link from the Known Issues link in the plugin mozilla page for Shockwave. From there, the bug 225894 is mentioned. On the last few posts you'll see where the Known Issues page got the suggestion from poster's who got it working by running in 2000 mode.

Hey, I sure wish I had a system that didn't need this workaround. I can assure you that the only way mine will run it without this workaround is by not using XP, or installing either Netscape 7.0 or Mozilla 1.3. The problem started with Netscape 7.1 and Mozilla 1.4 on Windows XP, and has persisted in every Mozilla build since.