30 March, 2006

Pandora and Internet Explorer 7

About a week ago I have installed IE7 build 5335 that was released on March 20. Instead of playing music, Pandora showed a message about that it's taking longer than expected to find next song to play. Firefox solved the "problem". Also the previous build of IE7 was able to play Pandora.

I have mailed Pandora support about the issue and they told me that they are working on IE7 support.

All this means that OpenPandora will not work if you install IE7 build 5335.
For me the solution was to uninstall IE7 and to return to "good" old IE6.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Couple questions:

1) Is this just an application with the Pandora flash application embedded in it? Or did you actually bother reverse engineering how their Secretary gets information for the next songs, etc?

2) Why not just use the Opera widget if there's no reverse engineering ( http://my.opera.com/community/customize/widgets/info/?id=3765 )? The widgets in the latest weekly build of Opera are more akin to desktop additions.

eitan said...

I have an embeded browser. I plan to add more functinality after I have more info (using reverse engineering).

Anonymous said...

Gotcha, so it's a standard windows app with the IE 6 browser component embedded in it, which then just calls out to the pandora player?

Let me know if you'd care to share once you get the reverse engineering done (I started, but was too lazy to finish). It would be for the purpose of providing a different flash interface to the player.

:)

eitan said...

All the upadtes will be in the blog.
Would you mind to share your findings? Project's mail is openpandora (at) gmail.com

Anonymous said...

Well, I just started with Fiddler to monitor all the communication that happened while pandora was running. For the most part, the request for the actual songs and song lists are pretty simple (don't have them on my system here offhand). If I remember correctly, the main problem seemed to be in the initial authentication and generation of a session key. I think there were some requests (like for the list of song information) that were flat-out failing - presumably because the request did not originate from their servers. To remedy that, you would need something to spoof the headers.

eitan said...

Yes. That what I found too. I plan adding more functionality even before I crack them. Their UI is good, since everything is within the same flash app, except for some external links. For now I am going to extend UI