Solved by Flick!! Pandora / Adblock plus / Firefox bug

I made Cathy happy by solving her Pandora problems! It took some fiddling, so I thought I might share it with y’all.

Pandora.com web music station was behaving erratically on my girlfriend’s 800Mhz ibook g4, OS 10.3.9 (osx) with firefox 1.5 .

The flash interface kept disappearing. Moving the mouse around would cause bits of it to appear temporarily but it was annoying.

The problem lay in Adblock plus. I tried upgrading to Firefox 2, re-installed flash, updated adblock, etc but that didn’t work. When I disabled Adblock Plus completely, it worked, but that was unacceptable – all those ads!

So I had to click the little “adblock plus” stop sign on the navigation bar at the top of the window, and click “show blockable elements.” It lists these in a little sidebar or maybe its own window.

The one you want is called

https://www.pandora.com/radio/tuner_7_4_0_1_pandora.swf

You have to right-click it in the sidebar list, then click “create exception.”

It will call up another window, you’ll notice it creates an exception with @@ in front of it. Hit “OK” or “APPLY” and there you have it, it should work now!

I did the same thing with the object called

http://www.pandora.com/Secretary.swf

But I don’t know if that’s necessary.

If you have regular adblock and you’re getting the same problem, you may have to use “whitelist this page.”

I tried PandoraBoy for OSX, which solved the adblocking problem, but it can’t open a new window so it is kind of useless – you can’t see the artist / song / album information that Pandora calls up in a new window.

Let me know if this is useful!

(the Pandora FAQ had this not-satisfactory answer, since it is a “nuclear option” of allowing ads for a whole class of materials)

Q: Why doesn’t the Pandora player show up in Firefox?

This can happen when the “Adblock” Firefox is installed. In the Adblock preferences, you’ll need to switch off the “Obj-tabs” option for the Pandora Player to show up. To do this, select “Preferences” in the Adblock sub-menu in Tools, then hit the “Adblock Options” button to get a drop-down. “Obj-tabs” is the first check box.

– flick harrison