Piwik don't detect flash plugin in internet explorer 8

Support & Bugs
1

Hello,
I have a flash based website and the detection of the flash plugin is important for me. But if a visitor is using the Internet Explorer 8 Piwik only detects java an no other plugins (but I know that flash is installed and working correctly). Is this a Problem of Piwik or do I a mistake?
Thanks for help.

2

After much deliberation, plugin detection on IE was removed in 0.4.2. On IE, we used the documented method of instantiating the plugin’s ActiveXObject.

Unfortunately, in some cases, visitors reported an addon opened a blank window (or attempted to), triggered a Windows security warning, or prompted the user to upgrade to a newer version. It is our belief that these events, though rare, impair the visitor’s experience and raise unwarranted security concerns – both of which increase bounce rate, turning away visitors.

3

[quote=vipsoft @ Mar 25 2010, 01:48 AM]After much deliberation, plugin detection on IE was removed in 0.4.2. On IE, we used the documented method of instantiating the plugin’s ActiveXObject.

Unfortunately, in some cases, visitors reported an addon opened a blank window (or attempted to), triggered a Windows security warning, or prompted the user to upgrade to a newer version. It is our belief that these events, though rare, impair the visitor’s experience and raise unwarranted security concerns – both of which increase bounce rate, turning away visitors.[/quote]

Ouch, no plugin detection at all in IE versions? Is there any work going into this direction?
I was already wondering why I got so low numbers in the plugin support.

4

Thomas, if you can find a way to detect plugin in IE without using the ActiveXObject hack, please let us know

5

Well, obviously I don’t have a solution at hand but maybe
link … www.pinlady.net/PluginDetect/
could contain some helpful code as I see the notice there:

[…]
Fortunately, there are some ActiveX controls that have been approved, and hence will not cause any security popups. PluginDetect makes every effort to only use approved controls whenever possible, so that the security popups are avoided.

thomas

6

The pinlady detect code instantiates the ActiveXObject either explicitly or implicitly (by embedding the object in the page). Neither of which solve the issue.

One can only hope that a future version of IE implements navigator.mimeTypes.