Nissan USA Owners Portal, Flash & Microsoft Surface

[bigtlb]

I have been willing to live with the Owners Portal and it's Flash requirement until now.

But, I just got one of the new Microsoft Surface tablets. This is an ARM based device, running Windows 8, but no Flash. So, no Owners Portal!

This finally pushed me over the edge... I called 1-877 NO GAS EV to complain about the Nissan Owners Portal. They need to fix it so that flash isn't required.

Am I alone or is this annoying? Has anyone else called?

 

[cwerdna]

I have been willing to live with the Owners Portal and it's Flash requirement until now.

But, I just got one of the new Microsoft Surface tablets. This is an ARM based device, running Windows 8, but no Flash.

That's not correct. There is Flash but MS maintains a white list. Google for microsoft surface adobe flash white list.

 

[Valdemar]

Most likely this information is not going to help you but there is a light-weight mobile version of the web-site, no flash, the problem is you can't access it directly, you get redirected there if they detect you're running a "supported" mobile browser. If you can spoof the "user-agent" string that your Surface browser sends to the website you can get to it. This can be done in Firefox, but I don't think it is available for Surface, at least not yet. I agree that owner's portal sucks because it is not accessible from all devices, and only few can get to the mobile version. Given how little help we get from Nissan with our cars and in general I'm not expecting improvements any time soon.

 

[bigtlb]

That's not correct. There is Flash but MS maintains a white list. Google for microsoft surface adobe flash white list.

Thanks for the link. Although useful, this won't help the non-technical Surface users who try to access the Owners Portal, unless we get Microsoft to add the site to their white list.

Most likely this information is not going to help you but there is a light-weight mobile version of the web-site, no flash, the problem is you can't access it directly, you get redirected there if they detect you're running a "supported" mobile browser.

Yes, I even told this to the support person, if they could just force surface machines to the mobile version of their site, I would be happy. I had been looking into making a WinRT wrapper like my Windows Phone Leaf Buddy app, to do this. But WinRT currently doesn't let you modify the WebView User-Agent string.

For the moment, I am considering using pyCarWings from fellow MyNissanLeaf'er haykinson as a base for a Windows 8 Store app.

I will try the hack and see if it fixes the desktop browser. The thing that dries me crazy is they don't really use flash on the Owners Portal itself, and have removed it as a requirement for their regular Nissan Owners portal. Or, at least give a link on the pop-up that says:

"You don't have Flash, would you like to install it?"

that says:

"No thanks just show me the mobile site".

 

[Valdemar]

My guess is that they just didn't have enough resources for testing their mobile site with all possible web-browsers, so they limited support to most popular variants that were QA tested. Adding a new supported client likely requires planning and running full set of tests on their part, so it is not as simple as adding 1 line of code. Given a hosting service writing a web-proxy app that sends one of the supported agents to Nissan and relays back the response to the client should be fairly simple.