Piwik starts Adobe Acrobat

Support & Bugs
1

Hi,
First of all, I really love Piwik.
It is a great follow-up for PhpMyVisites.

A customer of mine has a strange problem.
When he visits the site I’ve build for him (http://www.dirkbosfonds.nl/) Piwik starts Adobe Acrobat on his computer. It is definately Piwik that causes it, because we have also tried it without Piwik and in that case there is no problem.

Any ideas what causes this ??

Thanks in advance.
Rowdy Rabouw
double-R webdevelopment

2

Please clarify what you mean by “starts Adobe Acrobat”?

Piwik tries to detect the visitor’s browser plugins. On Internet Explorer that involves loading the ActiveXControl. Piwik does not load any .pdf files.

Due to security concerns, some versions of Internet Explorer will pop up an alert the first time an ActiveXControl is loaded in the browser.

3

Hi,
Thanks for your reply.
It literally starts Adobe Acrobat. No pop-up is shown, but the Acrobat-software starts up outside the browser without a document.
Just like you would start Acrobat from the start menu.

4

Please see if this also occurs on piwik.org or a blank html page with only the tracking code. I’d like to know if this is a script interaction.

In piwik.js, change PdfCtrl.PdfCtrl.1 to AcroPDF.PDF and see if the same result occurs? A difference in behavior could be a bad Reader install.

Please also report what version of IE and Reader?

Has your customer tried running Help -> Detect and Repair from the Reader menu?

Can you ask customer to uninstall all versions of Reader, run regclean, and then reinstall Reader?

5

I think I’ve heard this issue before, when running acrobat reader 5 or another old version. we may want to change the call to test the adobe plugin in piwik.js, like vipsoft suggested… It should affect only a tiny tiny number of users but that would still be an issue…

6

What if we iterate through an array of progids (newest to oldest as the order of preference), so we detect newer and older versions of the plugin?

7

Thanks.
I will first inform what version of IE and Adobe Acrobat he is using.

8

My customer just informed me that he uses Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and Adobe Acrobat 6 Professional.
Pretty old version of Acrobat Pro …

9

Try changing progid to PdfCtrl.PdfCtrl (without the version specified) and PdfCtrl.PdfCtrl.6 to see if either exhibit different behaviour.

The alternative is to manually disable the plugin check on IE (in piwik.js’s VBScript code, comment out the IsObject(CreateObject()) ) or reinstall as I suggested earlier.

We’ll make it easier to disable plugin detection in an upcoming release.

10

But would it be possible to detect plugins without this issue to occurs?

11

A properly installed Adobe Reader won’t exhibit this problem. Piwik has no way of knowing that the activex object is opening a window. (We don’t specify any file to open.)

When we implement first party cookies, we’ll only do the plugin check once per session.

12

Thanks for the reply vipsoft.