Earlier I was tweeting furiously about a problem I began noticing earlier this week when I opened the english.aljazeera.net/watch_now  page.  IE opened it’s yellow strip at the top of the viewport of the window and told me that Flash add-on was not installed.  The first time I did this,  I said,  OK,  install it.  But when I re-opened the same page,  the same message appeared.  When I looked at  other flash objects on other  sites,  Flash seemed to work fine.  So I  went back to the Aljazeera play_now  page and just clicked the X to ignore the message.  The video then played.  So Flash is there and working,  but I suspected there might be something with IE.  So I looked at the same page in Chrome and in Firefox.  Same deal (or so I thought).  The Firefox and Chrome browsers were saying “missing plugin” but not saying which one.  I realized this  only later,  after checking a few more variables.  I looked at my Vista desktop machine (I had begun noticing this on my Laptop running Windows 7 ). On the Vista machine,  I got no such error, even though the Program list on both machines listed the same two Flash Player items:  the Active X Player and the Flash Player “Add-in”. 

So,  I uninstalled Flash from my laptop and back on again.  Same deal.  So I went back to Chrome and Firefox. I noticed that one  of those,  when I went to “install the plugin” via it’s yellow install notification at the top of the browser window,  listed the missing plugin as Real Player.  Ahhh.  By this time I could not remember if IE had told me specifically “Flash” on it’s error (it  had,  because I later looked at my Win7 Netbook,  which had no Real Player installed,  and it gave the message that “Flash” was missing.  The missing plugin notification in IE on Win7 (IE8)  was wrong. 

When I told the Chrome (or  was it the Firefox?,  I forget that as  well) to install Real Player,  the message went away for all three browsers.  The message was coming up because elsewhere on the Aljazeera PlayNow page,  there was a Real Player detector being called. 

This whole thing doesn’t seem to happen at all on XP,  which is what runs on my Oldest computer.  It plays the AlJazeera stream page without complaining about Real Player at all.  That’s also why when I told the IE8 plugin message  to forget  about it by clicking the X,  the stream played fine,  since it  meant to tell me I had no Real Player instead of telling  me I had no Flash,  which I really did.  IE8 fail on that one.