Problem installing in Firefox

Edit Subject

Hey Jim,

Thanks for contacting us, I appologize for how frustrating this must be.

I am looking into your specific problems from the logs we have. I will post again once I have more details next steps to get us to resolve this.

I just wanted to mention a couple of things for you and the rest of our community about our 3D viewer technology (as it is relevant):

• We currently actively test and support Firefox, Safari, and IE on Windows and Mac.
  
• Currently, our initial viewer download is about 8 - 9MB (it's bigger once decompressed onto your computer, but we put a lot of effort into making it as small as possible, and avoiding re-downloading things as much as possible).
  
• We actually avoid using MS dev tools to build the Windows DLLs for this very reason, they introduce dependencies that we don't think should be necessary.
  

With that all said, our system has failed you, and I will take a look at it right now. :)

cheers,
eric

Hey Jim,

(this is Eric...the same Eric as the last post...I was logged into the wrong account!)

So, I looked into our logs and I definitely see what you were experiencing. There seem to be two different things happening in Firefox and in IE (which may be related):

(1) Firefox failed when launching a signed applet

A signed applet enables us to get your permission to run privileged code (which we use to render 3d) on your machine. In our compatibility test, this happens after we launch an un-privileged applet to ensure Java is installed and working.

Java definitely seems installed and working.

In our experience, launching the signed applet can fail if:

1. a user doesn't respond to the popup box asking for permissions to run
   
2. the user doesn't see or doesn't get a popup box to grant permissions for some reason
   
3. the applet takes longer to download and start than our timeout period (30 seconds) for this part of the test
   

I am guessing it is option 3 due to the things I am noticing with IE.

(2) IE took a long time during certain network related parts of startup

Specifically, the two attempts to load our test motion took over 1 minute each. This is insanely slow.

Initial viewer download was blazingly fast by comparison at about 2 minutes for 8.5MB (~72KB/sec).

These things are a little contradictory.

Next Steps:

With this information, I am leaning toward this being a networking related issue that can be on our side or your side. It is really hard to tell from the information I have.

Can you answer / try the following:

1. Related to Firefox, do you remember seeing a popup asking for permissions to run? (You would have seen the same permissions prompt in IE when using it.)
   what country are you in (state if in the US)
   
2. what type of internet connection (cable, dsl, satellite, other?) do you have
   
3. what are the results when you visit the following internet connection tools:
   
4. http://www.speedtest.net/
   
5. http://www.pingtest.net/
   

I realize this whole thing is incredibly frustrating. Getting your answers to the above questions will help us avoid anyone else having a similar bad experience as you have. We also want to offer you a discount on our motions for your help.

Once again, thanks. We should be able to get this figured out.

cheers,
eric