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Level 1

10 points

Safari 6.0.4 Cannot Play Google Voice Voicemails

I've been troubleshooting this problem for far too many hours, and I am at a loss. I've tried everything other than reinstalling the entire system. Instead of doing that, I'm switching to Chrome and posting here in the hopes of finding a better solution.

The problem: Safari will not play google voice embedded audio voicemail files.

The voicemails show up with a play icon and a time; when you click on them, the graphic changse to an audio file progress bar, but the file never plays.
These voicemails WILL play in Chrome and they WILL play in Firefox.
More frustratingly, they will also play on my wife's iMac that is also running all updated software (OS X 10.8.3, Safari 6.0.4, etc.), and on my own iOS devices with Safari.

Background

I'm running 10.8.3 on a 2.7ghz core i5 27" iMac.
I have updated to the newest OS and all software updates.
I'm running the newest version of Flash and Java, and all are functioning properly.
I've uninstalled flip4mac and anything else that I thought might conflict with playing audio files.
I've reset safari numerous times, booted into safe mode, restarted numerous times, emptied every cache under the sun, repaired permissions, run daily/weekly/monthly updatesa in termina, and tried disabling all internet plugins. Nothing works.

Current Understanding/Knowledge/Conclusion

These files are NOT using any plug-ins to play, but are just using standard html5 audio tags. My wife's computer will play the files fine even with the quicktime plug-ins disabled. They DO use javascript to switch to the full audio player progress button, but I don't think javascript has anything to do with playing the actual file. Note: Firefox plays the files differently and it depends on Flash to play them; but I don't think that's the case with Chrome, and both Chrome and Safari are webkit browsers. Safari is unique in being a 64 bit webkit browser, and I'd be willing to chalk this up to it just not working in Safari – but it works just fine on my wife's machine.

Any solutions, ideas, or even troubleshooting tips would be welcome. As I said at the outset, the only next step I can see is reinstalling ML, and I'd rather just switch to Chrome than do that...

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on May 6, 2013 6:10 AM

17 replies

May 15, 2013 9:35 AM in response to fronesis

Thanks for your reply. I may have to give this a try when I have the hours to do so. Did you notice improvements with your other apps as well?

fronesis Author

Level 1

10 points

May 15, 2013 11:10 AM in response to cbird1057

cbird1057 wrote:

Thanks for your reply. I may have to give this a try when I have the hours to do so. Did you notice improvements with your other apps as well?

In my case I am fairly sure my problem was direclty related to javascript. Javascript is necessary in Safari to play google voice voicemails, and that was the initial site of my problem. I was not experiencing any other major problems before the reinstall, but after the reinstall I do notice that javascript seems to work much better, not just in Safari but also in Chrome (this is slightly odd since Chrome uses a different version of javascript). But overall, I have had ZERO problems with anything since the reinstall.

To be clear: I did a reinstall while leaving everything else on the HD in place and this did NOT work. I had do an ERASE and then reinstall to get things right.

Safari 6.0.4 Cannot Play Google Voice Voicemails