A few days ago I was struggling with an application that made use of the client computer’s microphone for crucial functions. The problem was that the built-in security settings panel for granting access to the microphone did not open in Firefox on the Mac.
Normally, whenever you do this:
var mic:Microphone = Microphone.getMicrophone();
The Flash Player automatically opens this panel to ask the user to allow the microphone to be connected:
Of course this panel is never invoked if the user has the settings set to always allow or always deny, but very few do.
When this sucker never presented itself, I naturally thought that I was doing something wrong. Let’s face it, that’s the most probable cause. But after a while I noticed that the problem was specific to Firefox on the Mac. Knowing that SWFObject has had it’s issues with FIrefox in the past, I tried swapping it out for the jQueryFlash plugin, and voilà! How the JavaScript insertion method of the flash content could possibly cause it is beyond me. Honestly I don’t have the JS knowledge or interest to investigate either, seeing as I had a solution.
With SWFObject 1.5 there was a problem causing the stageWidth and stageHeight to be 0 for a certain time after the movie was loaded. That might be relevant in this case as well, but the microphone dialog was supposed to open long after the movie was fully loaded. That kinda rules it out.
So now you know. Don’t spend an entire night on this, like I did.
Get the Flash plugin for jQuery here:
http://jquery.lukelutman.com/plugins/flash/
I just wanted to post a quick note that you and this blog post saved me today. I was having a problem in which my “webcam” confirmation box just would not show up (only on a Chromebook, go figure). I was pulling my hair out and decided to try the jQuery Flash plugin and – surprise! – it fixed it.
Thank you!
Glad I could help:) Since this post I’ve been having issues with the jQuery flash plugin too that has to do with using the Facebook Graph API. But the morale should be to also look for browser inconsistencies and consider the embed method when debugging. Cheers!