Android Gingerbread browser detects as HTML5.

  • While checking for the behaviour on different Android tablets I found the detection of flash to be very misleading.
    I get back to that later.

    However it made me check on my own HTC Desire Z with Android 2.3.3 now also updated to 2.4.

    I disabled flash in my default browser and to my surprise my newer KRpano sites are trying to use HTML5 with very weird results.
    Sites from last year KRpano 2011-05-20 detects correct as flash.

    Other browsers, Dolphin Opera and even Firefox (which does not support flash) is detecting the newer tours as flash

    Also the tablets I have tested with Android 3.1 or 3,2 do it correct.in the default browser.


    See the attached files. These are same tour in default browser and in Dolphin.

  • The default browser
    Your User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16

    and Dolphin gives me this.
    Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.3; da-dk; HTC Vision Build/GRI40) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

    Hans

  • I have tried to reset the browser settings and that changed it to the same as Dolphin.

    And I found that what changes it is that the default settings is activating mobile versions of websites.
    If I deactivate that I am detected as a desktop Safari and that is now choosing HTML5 if no flash.

    The normal user will have very hard to figure this out.

    Hans

  • The pages you are sent to from the standard Install Flash page are also different depending on browser and Android versions.

    Some of them do refer you correctly to the Android Market Flash 11 page but on the tablets with Honeycomb I got an old Adobe page which was very confusing as it had no download link but just said something about Android did support flash in version 2.2.
    It did not say anything that you had to install it from the Market store.
    The normal user who is used to install flash from web download would never figure it out without help.

    The funny thing is that Firefox which does not support Flash does it correct but without telling you that you can not use it at all with Firefox.

    Hans

  • Hi,

    Your User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16

    that's the User Agent of the Desktop Safari on Mac... and that's the reason why the detection fails...

    The normal user will have very hard to figure this out.

    sorry, but getting the right content by using a faked user agent can't be assumed...

    Do you think a normal user would fake the user agent?
    I have stock Android devices with stock Android browsers on phone and tab and none of them provides a possibility to change the user agent (without calling 'about:debug')...

    Beside of that - the embedding script for krpano version 1.0.9 was already completely redesigned - there it will provide an advanced feature detection - that means that script will detect the real browser features like CSS3D or WebGL or Flash and only if one of these is really available, the embedding will work.

    Best regards,
    Klaus

  • I think the big problem is that the detection can not tell you if you do not have Flash installed or if it is just deactivated in the browser,

    It seems that some of the Vendors are delivering them with flash installed but with the plugins deactivated in the browser.
    And that takes you to that misleading Adobe page

    I talked to what should have been experts in several shops and none of them was able to get Flash to work on Samsung Galaxy 10.1.
    It was first then I checked the installed apps that I found that it was installed but the browser had it inactivated.

    Hans

  • Hi,

    I think the big problem is that the detection can not tell you if you do not have Flash installed or if it is just deactivated in the browser,

    I agree, but it's not possible to detect if the Flash is installed but deactivated on Android...

    There is a browser Javascript array called 'navigator.plugins' and this array contains a list of all available plugins in the browser. And when the Flashplayer is disabled or not installed on Android, then this list is empty. So from script-perspective there is no way to differ if not-installed or just disabled.

    Best regards,
    Klaus

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