Sep
27
Yes, it’s true. MSN Video has finally released Beta support for Safari (Mac) and Firefox (Mac/PC) support on our MSNBC.com video player. I’m going to have to get Ubuntu back up and running on a spare machine to test, but it might even coincidentally work on Linux boxes with current versions of Firefox and Flash.
As someone who works all day on a company-supplied 17″ Macbook Pro running OS-X, and plays all night on my personal Mac Pro (also running OS-X 90% of the time), this is freaking great. It’s even better for my wife, a devout computer neophyte who knows only enough to know that she loves Macs and hates our site because video doesn’t work.
I’m not going to go into the long, sordid tale of why it took so long, but I will say the MSN Video team really Sees the Light now. When I received my super-secret MSN Soapbox invite, the first thing I did was fire it up in Safari. Low and behold, it works great. Huge kudos to those guys for taking the time to make sure their products are going to work for all of us going forward.
We’re not ready to crow too loudly quite yet. This release is still in Beta, and may stay that way for a while. If you fire up the player and let it run for a while– about an hour in my very informal testing– Safari will bomb out, no doubt due to some nasty memory leak somewhere in the chain (my wildly uninformed guess- Flash plugin). Edge case, yes, but it’s a little annoying if you know it’s there. Side note: Intel Mac folks should really upgrade to the latest Universal Binary version of the Flash plugin. It’s far more stable than what came stock on our Macbook Pros.
Also, the Firefox/Safari player doesn’t support ads quite yet, which you’re probably thrilled about, but is an issue for us and our balance sheet. Finally, the video gallery at the bottom of the player seems to be a little slugish when the player first loads. There may be other issues that we haven’t found yet but rest assured we’re going to make sure the dev team keeps pounding away on these issues.
More broadly, I can say with great confidence that the days of sub-par Mac support at MSNBC.com are coming to a great and final end. The question of Mac support comes up every time we evaluate new technologies, Microsoft-developed or not. There are loads of Macs now in use all across MSNBC.com, not just by our graphics folks but by Program Managers, a couple of Directors, even a VP.
Things aren’t perfect yet but we’re very, very serious about platform parity. Nothing better than eating your own dogfood….
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