Issues with Firefox8 and Dropbox (update 2: partially fixed)

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Nicolas Mollet

Firefox 8 (and 9) came out recently and now supports cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). The problem is that Dropbox, Photobucket and other file sharing providers don’t.

On Firefox8-9, the icons you uploaded on a file sharing service won’t show up anymore.
I am trying to find a solution with Dropbox.

If Dropbox can’t support CORS, then Dropbox can’t be used to host the icons. A traditional file hosting would be the only way to load the icons on Firefox. Of course, it means editing every icon on all your maps, which is a lot of work !

I will keep this post updated in case I find a better way. Suggestions are welcome, please post your comments and ideas.

Update 1 (January, 09 2012):

  • Google Maps: is supposed to work on a fix… no specific date for this.
  • Firefox: won’t fix anything, not their problem.
  • Dropbox: still not working, no news from them.
  • Photobucket: still not working, no news from them.
  • Picasa: always worked, it’s the only file sharing service working at the moment on ff8+
  • Google Sites: still not working, and no news from them.

Check this test map to see which file sharing services are working or not.

Update 2 (January, 10 2012):

Google Maps have been fixed today and the icons will now appear again on Firefox 8+ !

The new Google Maps mode “MapsGL” still won’t display the icons (on Firefox & Chrome)… Picasa is still the only file sharing service working with “MapsGL” mode.

Permanent solution on shared hosting or dedicated server (not using file sharing services)

If you own a (Apache) server, and can access FTP files, icons will show again if you do the following:

  1. Create a file named .htaccess with a text editor
  2. Put the following line into this file: 
    Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin *
  3. Save the file
  4. Upload it to the root folder with your FTP app (beware it you already have a .htaccess file : in this case, you must add the line “header set…” in the existing htaccess file)
  5. Reload your map … voila!

License

Icons are availabe unter the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC BY SA 3.0) which lets you remix, tweak, and build upon our work even for commercial reasons, as long as you credit the project and license your new creations under the identical terms.
Please credit as follows: Maps Icons Collection https://mapicons.mapsmarker.com
Logo:
hotlinking logo
Please note: hotlinking (=loading icons directly from this site) is not allowed and will result in the icons being replaced with the placeholder image on the left!
Please download and host the icons on your own server, Dropbox or Google Drive.