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R
RedOrAlive
Participant
April 21, 2015
Answered

Any ideas how we can get flash error prompts in the PPAPI plugin for Chrome on a Mac?

  • April 21, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 485 views

Hi,

I am having difficulty using the flash player for debugging purposes. Normally when we used the NPAPI debug flash player - which is now unsupported by default in Chrome 42- we used to get errors/stack trace overlays that would pop up in the browser.

This allowed our QA's and less technical members of the team to instantly see errors that occurred during play-through's, which they could in turn direct to us. However it appears that the new PPAPI debug player no longer supports the use of alert windows (I saw this in another post on this forum)?

So I have a couple of questions. Firstly how can I be sure that the Flash Player I have installed is a debug one? According to chrome://plugins, its only the built in one thats active, even though I have d/l and installed the correct "chromuim browser" debug flash player for Mac multiple times. 

Secondly if it is the debug player, how can I replicate the alert windows or at least get a logger trace from peoples machines? We use Vizzy at the moment but that can be quite flaky, especially after a FP update, is this still our only option?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Paul.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer jeromiec83223024

Yeah, I need to write an article on the whole debugger matrix in 2015.  It's super fragmented.  I miss the old days when we had tech writers. 

On Windows, the Chrome team added some code to recognize the PPAPI debugger.  Mac has a much smaller audience (it's basically 7% of browsing), so they're prioritizing it differently, and there's effectively still no support in either Chrome or Chromium for Mac. 

You might be able to do something hacky like manually replacing the payload, or looking at the chrome commandline options to force it to load the debugger plugin from an arbitrary location, but those are inelegant, and if they work, we're not testing them like they're supported.  The PPAPI interface is also more restrictive, so the debugger is less robust and placing debugger-specific config files is really weird because Flash sees a virtualized filesystem that's in a different location when running in Chrome.

You *can* run the PPAPI debugger in Opera on Mac, as it supports PPAPI plugins and uses the central system locations.

Alternatively, you can still force NPAPI on in Chrome through some administrative flags.

1 reply

jeromiec83223024
jeromiec83223024Correct answer
Inspiring
April 24, 2015

Yeah, I need to write an article on the whole debugger matrix in 2015.  It's super fragmented.  I miss the old days when we had tech writers. 

On Windows, the Chrome team added some code to recognize the PPAPI debugger.  Mac has a much smaller audience (it's basically 7% of browsing), so they're prioritizing it differently, and there's effectively still no support in either Chrome or Chromium for Mac. 

You might be able to do something hacky like manually replacing the payload, or looking at the chrome commandline options to force it to load the debugger plugin from an arbitrary location, but those are inelegant, and if they work, we're not testing them like they're supported.  The PPAPI interface is also more restrictive, so the debugger is less robust and placing debugger-specific config files is really weird because Flash sees a virtualized filesystem that's in a different location when running in Chrome.

You *can* run the PPAPI debugger in Opera on Mac, as it supports PPAPI plugins and uses the central system locations.

Alternatively, you can still force NPAPI on in Chrome through some administrative flags.

R
RedOrAliveAuthor
Participant
April 27, 2015

Hi Jeromie,

Thanks for getting back to me. I must admit I didn't realise the audience for Mac and Chrome was so small, so I understand the prioritzation.

I've currently got the QA's to use the "Enable NPAPI" flag settings in Chrome and it appears to be working for now, but obviously this is a short term solution until NPAPI is completely dropped in September. Hopefully by then the Mac / Chrome PPAPI plugin will have the extra code that will enable it to work correctly.

Thanks again!

Paul

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