Friday, September 21, 2012

"Listen now" page needing compatibility mode in IE

Many Internet Explorer users had trouble with our "Listen Now" page.

This link works with browsers which have flash plugin installed and javascript enabled, or with browsers which have HTML5 mp3 support like Safari on iPad/iPhone. But this link has problems with Internet Explorer on Win7 and above. Or perhaps the issue is with IE7 and above. On some machines, the page needs compatibility mode enabled in order for the audio to play. On some machines, the player does not display until the page is refreshed, even though the audio is heard.

We had not made much headway in solving this bug for the last one year. Then we sent this to a volunteer, who suggested the following links,

http://jplayer.org/latest/developer-guide/#jPlayer-option-ready

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8661469/issue-with-multiple-instances-of-jplayer-in-ff-and-ie

The second link  refers to multiple instances, probably that is not our issue.


The first link  seems to be addressing our issue at the bottom of that page:
Internet Explorer 9 Beta (Win)
The Flash is disabled in jPlayer by default due to bugs with Flash's ExternalInterface in this browser.
The IE9 bugs listed there, and at places like here , here, and here seem to be the issue. We tried one of the workarounds mentioned on one of the posts, ie adding

!DOCTYPE html (within angle brackets)
to the top of the php page. That was not enough. Then our volunteer pointed us to this page, and accordingly we added the meta tag
http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"
to the top of the php page.

And that seemed to solve both the issues in IE, by forcing IE to use compatibility mode.

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