Blogger Feed Displayed in Flash Crashing FireFox 3, With Fix

Rob Ruchte — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:47:07 +0000

Recently, Blogger began appending a tracking gif to the content of each entry in their Atom feeds. The URL used in the image src uses https, most likely to avoid warnings when it's rendered in a https context. For some reason, when rendering the feed content containing the tracking image, the Flash player can crash, taking the browser with it on certain platform/browser combinations. We found the problem in FireFox 3.0 on OSX, but only on PPC Macs. Go figure.

In our case, we are proxying the Atom feed through a PHP script so we can display the feed contents to user agents without the Flash player. This made it fairly easy to iterate through the entries, and with a simple bit of regex, strip out the offending markup from the contents.

Blogger is wrapping the image tag in a div with a very specific CSS class, which makes our job easy:

foreach($feed->entries as $currEntry)

{

    $currEntry->content = ereg_replace('.*

', '', $currEntry->content);

}

Depending on what you're using to parse the feed, you may or may not need to be concerned about decoding and encoding html entities during this process.

Karoshi Ethos » Blogger

Blogger Feed Displayed in Flash Crashing FireFox 3, With Fix