This is a quote from a genuine “bug report”.
Motif is a form of Flash files that Double Click uses to serve rich media. The
motif ads use a .mta extension, and are basically the same as an .swf with
some addition ad tracking features.It doesn’t appear that users can see motif files in Firefox, this is a serious
problem for advertisers that are trying to serve those ads to an audience that
is likely to download and use firefox.
Oh no! ;-)
Please don’t spam the bug.
You do know that web content is not FREE?
Severity of Major is wrong, and enhancement is the wrong word to describe it.
Isn’t this an Evangelism bug, like alt tooltips?
– Chris
Yet another reason why Firefox is so much better than any other alternative.
Please don’t “fix” this!
if the advertisers were truely worried about it… they would start using .swf files. Lord knows we don’t need them interjecting a whole ton of random filenames that mean the same thing into our nice little browser :)
Anders
If they’re just Flash files, there’s no legit reason to change the extension. If they’ve changed the Flash format to enable their evil tracking, then they deserve to have it break, as they’re creating a new format and deploying it without informing anyone first. I created a new plugin format last night that enables real-time 3D holograms with just some simple custom HTML tags, but Firefox won’t render it as a real-time 3D hologram. Is this Firefox’s fault? No. It’s mine for making new proprietary changes to a standard format.
Also, Doubleclick can go to hell with it’s tracking. Yes, the Social Contract says we should put up with some ads for free content, but that deal is broken by popups, popunders, screen overlay ads, ads that talk abd don’t shut up, and Doubleclick trying to find nefarious ways to track what web users do by exploiting plugins.
Maybe I read it wrong, as far as I can tell, it appears that it’s Doubleclick that is doing the browser sniffing and only serves the .mta to IE/win users.
I don’t think the extenstion matters to firefox anyways, as long as it’s serve the proper Content-Type. (i.e. you can serve a .txt file as application/x-shockwave-flash and it would try to play it as a flash file)