I was using Firefox 3.5.x – don’t remember the version – and at one point noticed Google Street View didn’t work correctly. I was able to drag the orange figure onto the map, and then there it would stand, like a human traffic cone, and nothing happened. No photos.
So I first installed 3.6.6, figuring there was a problem with Firefox that had been fixed in a more recent version. No success.
Then I googled “street view doesn’t work in firefox” and found this site. They suggested upgrading my flash player, which I did. The installation completed 100%, but no success with Street View.Out of ideas, I switched to IE and tried Street View. It told me that the flash player was outdated and needed an update, so I upgraded here, too. And ta-dah, it worked!
So, back to Firefox: I went to the Flash download page again and found instructions for downloading and installing with Firefox. I added www.adobe.com to the list of sites that are allowed to install add-ons (Tools/Options/Security) and for good measure to the list of sites that are allowed to generate Popups (Tools/Options/Applications). The installation looked a bit different, but it displayed the same message of a successful installation and again did nothing to fix Street View.
Aha, I thought, I bet it’s my Flashblock. I disabled it, restarted Firefox, and ta-dah, Street View works! I don’t know who (Google, Adobe, Mozilla, or the Flashblock programmers) is to blame, but Flashblock 1.5.13 seems not to work right with the current Street View and Firefox and Flash 10.1.
So, although I liked it (especially for youtube playback control), I’m turning Flashblock off for now, but if I find I don’t use Street View enough, and the instant playback on youtube bugs me enough, I’ll turn it back on. I wish they’d fix this situation, though, so that for Street View I’d get the same “play” symbol Flashblock usually displays.
The Flashblock does cause troubles…
Thank you! Because I had been looking only at new places, I didn’t realize Street View wasn’t working overall — I thought it just wasn’t complete for Basel. That’s true, but it wasn’t the problem. I checked after reading this post, and Street View wasn’t working for places I knew it had worked before.
I don’t know why it suddenly broke, but you’re right that it’s a Flashblock problem. I was able to solve it by putting maps.google.com on my Flashblock whitelist.
I use AdBlock Plus add-on for firefox and haven’t had many(any?) problems with it! Interesting problem you ran into though!
Thank you, Sursumcorda. I’ve added maps.google.ch, maps.google.fr, and maps.google.de to the whitelist – maps.google.com wasn’t enough.
Paul: AdBlock Plus doesn’t seem to cause any trouble. Flashblock (useful for a lot of things) used to work without whitelisting Google Maps, but something must have changed between Google, Adobe, Mozilla, and Flashblock in the meantime.
Mark: Thanks for the Street View collection!
I also submitted a bug report to the Flashblock crew at the Flashblock site via their contact form, and heard back this morning. Philip Chee said:
If you don’t have it on the toolbar, you’ll have to go to Tools/Add-ons, highlight Flashblock, and click on Options – and you will have to enter http://www.google.com again in the address bar, at least in my experience, something like a â€Street View re-boot†I suppose.
When I asked for permission to post Philip’s reply here, he added that he’d included a note on the Flashblock download page under Developer Comments.
I’ll have to say Flashblock has a better and faster response than the Obama presidential campaign did when I wrote them!
I find that most open source projects respond quicker (and with useful content) than any other contact. In this particular case, a bug wasn’t solved, nor really possible, other than the workaround you found, but I love it when I can submit a bug report, with or without a suggested patch, and have it fixed within hours. I don’t really understand why people think closed-source software is a better idea. How many months would it take for a bug to be fixed in Word?
First: add maps.google.co.uk as well.
Jon: Yes, speed is the advantage of having a smaller team that’s personally involved, and I am suitably impressed by Philip Chee. I’m not sure how he gets paid – perhaps you can explain more on that – or in general how me paying nothing for software gets me a potentially better product. I have yet to understand the business model, which I suppose is what many people struggle with. Perhaps the software industry allows for a completely new paradigm, but we old-fashioned folks think of old-fashioned items like cars and sewing machines and have a hard time seeing the advantages of a product made by a few loosely connected and poorly remunerated guys and that’s constantly changing (yes, improvement-type change, but change nonetheless). We don’t necessarily want to update our sewing machine every time we turn it on and might even prefer a mostly stable (albeit slightly buggy) version that remains the official version for two years. What if the brakes on your car suddenly tightened because of an update, or the gear lever changed position due to user feedback?
By the way, I currently prefer MS Office 2007 to Openoffice 3. It seems to me that in this case the closed-source guys have overtaken the open-source guys in terms of what counts for me: usefulness and usability.
I haven’t used Office since a while ago, maybe right around the 2007 version – I never did like menus that hide themselves based on the state of the program, ie. Corel Draw… I got tired of documents not being openable in another version of Microsoft Word. Even the free document viewer can’t open all documents created by the same version. With open source software, problems like that get fixed, and you don’t have to worry about not being able to open files (or have their layouts change) if you get a new computer, etc.
I don’t think the updating every time you turn it on is an open vs. closed source question.
Some Linux distributions exist to answer that question – Redhat and CentOS exist for the old, stable corporate customers that don’t want to have anything change, ever, and so they are still running Firefox 1.0, etc.
Debian (my preferred version) has “stable”, “testing”, and “unstable” versions. The “stable” version changes every 18-24 months, not counting security updates, that get fixed quickly. The “unstable” version contains nightly builds, and other versions that haven’t been tested a whole lot, and so you need to be a developer or at least someone with a high tolerance for things breaking fairly often. I run “testing” for all of my stuff. There is a ten day waiting period for something to get out of unstable without any bugs being filed in the meantime. I run unstable things occasionally to get a bug fix quicker, or if I am testing something.
I only update manually (on Linux and Windows, when I had it on my laptop) because I want to have it in the back of my head that I just updated, and so if something starts acting funny, I can suspect the upgrade, rather than something I did…
It is true that small projects can disappear, whether open or closed source. But with an open source project, you can take over it yourself, where the closed source program, you are stuck with whatever you got the first time, and if it stops working due to an OS upgrade, oh well, go buy some other software, where in the open source world, I fix things occasionally when the authors have disappeared, or decided they don’t care about supporting certain options, etc.
I understand the money question, and mostly people answer it by charging for technical support. Some places, like MySQL have an open and a closed license, where you can pay for the one, or get it free, where the paid version comes with more guarantees, support, etc.
Since my company is entirely built on open source software, I can say that model is pretty successful.
If you compare software in certain categories, proprietary software isn’t even on the list. I’m thinking of blogging and other content management software. I don’t know of any proprietary software that people really consider any more.
When you say your company is built on open source software, do you mean that’s all you use for your work, or that you make your money from writing open source software?
If someone discovers a bug in a stable version, does that stable version get updated, or does the bugfix go into the current unstable one?
Intuitively, I simply still have a hard time figuring out how the programmers get paid – it seems there’s a lot of volunteer work going on. Somehow it doesn’t seem like a sustainable business model, or one that only can work if it’s cross-financed by something else. I guess it’s a little odd for me to use wordpress and firefox and openoffice, even though it all goes against my gut instinct.
For me, the advantage of being able to fix an abandoned open source program is nil, and I suspect that goes for many non-programmers. To get back to the car analogy, it’s a bit like including the CAD drawings with the car. It would somehow look noble on the part of the maker, but I’d derive little benefit from it.
I meant that is all that I used for my work. Whenever I improve the software for my users, I publish it, either by way of the original author or bug reports, or if those methods aren’t available for some reason, I’ll publish them on my company’s blog.
I don’t have exact numbers, but given that we do a 10% referral rate, and that number has paid for a little more than the hosting for LifeType (originally agreed to at $400), I assume we receive somewhere a little more than $4K/year of referral income based on people finding me from the work I do on LifeType. I have some customers that agree to publish the code I do for them, others want it kept secret. The GNU Public License version 2, which is a common open source license allows for you to keep modifications to existing open source software hidden if you don’t “publish” it, and it has been determined that running PHP scripts on a web page is not considered publishing. Version 3 of the GPL was supposed to fix that “error”, and there was a fair bit of uproar over that, but I am not sure if that ended up happening. I glanced at the license at one point and it wasn’t obvious to me, but I haven’t had to worry about that yet.
Almost all software I write is built using open source languages and compilers, etc. I do have a couple customers that require Microsoft’s compilers, and so I have purchased a couple different versions of their compilers, but in some cases, those compilers aren’t required, when I am writing Windows applications, and the client usually doesn’t care, just so long as he can recompile it himself if needs to, and he is generally happy enough to not need a specific version of a Microsoft compiler that may or may not be available when he goes to compile it in X years. (Microsoft compilers are even worse than Microsoft Office in terms of versions – I recently quoted $5K to update a client’s software to the latest version).
There is a lot of volunteer work going on, and their are companies that pay guys to write open source software (with more or less generous spirits depending on the circumstances)
But, if you have the CAD drawings, you can give them to any mechanic and he’d be able to work on it, rather than having to buy the drawings when you need them, or have them not available at all, and when something goes wrong, the mechanic saying, “sorry, this car is closed source, you’ll have to call Microsoft to see if they are willing to fix your car; there’s nothing I can do for you”.
I occasionally run into commercial companies that sell their open source code (and trust that people won’t give it to others) but don’t provide much support in the way of fixing bugs, etc. that customers ask them about, or perhaps the customer thinks a particular bug is higher priority than the company thinks. The customer can hire me to fix the problem for them, and I can give the source code back to the company (and sometimes they really think the bug is low priority and aren’t even interested in taking free code…), but my customer is happy with or without the original company fixing it.
“cross-financed”: there are somewhat unrelated financing going on in various places, but the most common financing in the open source world is to give away the code, but charge for support. I think there are some problems in that model, since then the more bugs you have the more money you make.
Stable vs. unstable: New code always goes into unstable, unless the bug was “fixed” in a later version by removing/changing the code entirely, in which case new code would be introduced (very carefully) into the stable branch. If the code goes in the unstable branch, then the guys in charge of security for the stable release will go in and grab bits and pieces from the unstable version and copy/backport them into the stable release if the fixes are important enough.