Flash Player no longer loads for radar.weather.gov
Posted: 2019-03-25, 03:25
In the last few days (3rd week of March 2019), the U.S. National Weather Service seems to have updated their weather radar application such that Pale Moon no longer plays the Adobe Flash application that shows the moving weather patterns.
It works in Firefox 66.0.1 64-bit but not under Pale Moon 28.4.0 64-bit (on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit). I have installed Adobe Flash Player 32.0.0.156 for both AX-IE and NAPI.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm also experiencing TLS handshake timeouts on various websites, not the weather sites and not Pale Moon forum, for example. My ISP, Hughesnet (I have satellite broadband) is upgrading my connection to Gen5 next week and they claim that will solve the problem (I'm guessing they're reallocating server capacity from the older Gen4 infrastructure to force us holdouts to upgrade). FWIW...
But the Flash Player radar page works with Firefox so, that suggests a hidden TLS timeout is not the problem (there are no error or info messages)
I also tried with Pale Moon in safe mode with no addons enabled, but that didn't seem to make any difference.
Here is the webpage for the Milwaukee, Wisconsin radar map.
https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid ... 11&loop=no
Under Firefox (and the way it worked a week ago under Pale Moon), it will first load a static radar weather image.
Then if you click one of the "loop" links on the left column, such as Base "loop" (don't click Base, just the "loop" link to the right of Base), you will see a progress bar as the flash player and the sequential radar images load. When it's finished loading it plays in a loop.
That works under Firefox, but under Pale Moon the static radar image window collapses but is not replaced by the flash player window. There are no error messages.
Someone on another topic suggested improper useragent sniffing was a problem getting flash to play, and so I cobbled together the following config entry for a new string:
Preference name = "general.useragent.override.radar.weather.gov" (entered without quotes)
string value = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/4.1 Firefox/66.0 PaleMoon/28.4.0" (entered without quotes)
But that didn't work. I'm unsure what the correct parameters ought to be or if this is even the problem.
So I'm asking for help, please.
What is wrong? what is the fix?
It works in Firefox 66.0.1 64-bit but not under Pale Moon 28.4.0 64-bit (on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit). I have installed Adobe Flash Player 32.0.0.156 for both AX-IE and NAPI.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm also experiencing TLS handshake timeouts on various websites, not the weather sites and not Pale Moon forum, for example. My ISP, Hughesnet (I have satellite broadband) is upgrading my connection to Gen5 next week and they claim that will solve the problem (I'm guessing they're reallocating server capacity from the older Gen4 infrastructure to force us holdouts to upgrade). FWIW...
But the Flash Player radar page works with Firefox so, that suggests a hidden TLS timeout is not the problem (there are no error or info messages)
I also tried with Pale Moon in safe mode with no addons enabled, but that didn't seem to make any difference.
Here is the webpage for the Milwaukee, Wisconsin radar map.
https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid ... 11&loop=no
Under Firefox (and the way it worked a week ago under Pale Moon), it will first load a static radar weather image.
Then if you click one of the "loop" links on the left column, such as Base "loop" (don't click Base, just the "loop" link to the right of Base), you will see a progress bar as the flash player and the sequential radar images load. When it's finished loading it plays in a loop.
That works under Firefox, but under Pale Moon the static radar image window collapses but is not replaced by the flash player window. There are no error messages.
Someone on another topic suggested improper useragent sniffing was a problem getting flash to play, and so I cobbled together the following config entry for a new string:
Preference name = "general.useragent.override.radar.weather.gov" (entered without quotes)
string value = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/4.1 Firefox/66.0 PaleMoon/28.4.0" (entered without quotes)
But that didn't work. I'm unsure what the correct parameters ought to be or if this is even the problem.
So I'm asking for help, please.
What is wrong? what is the fix?