Today I discovered a problem with the way Magento allows you to upload images to attach to products: whenever I attempted to do so my entire browser would crash. (I’m using Firefox 2 on Linux.) Booting into Windows and using IE7 didn’t suffer from this problem so it was clearly an issue with Firefox. Looking into it a bit further, Magento uses Flash/Flex to allow file uploads so this is likely the root cause of the issue.
Upgrading to the latest version of Flash - 9.0.124.0 at the time I wrote this - solves the problem and allows image uploads. So if you’re having issues with getting this feature to work in Firefox I’d suggest upgrading Flash as the first thing to try.
I ran into this problem on Firefox/Mac. I upgraded to the latest version of Flash but it would still not work. It just silently fails with a cryptic message stating "HTTP Upload Error". I don’t know about you, but I love it when apps silently fail. It allows me the opportunity to debug, test, and file bug reports: a privilege usually reserved for the developers and testers.
Back to the topic, I’m baffled that Magento would resort to an awkward method that relies on third party plugins, and then not bother to test it on more than one, specific platform. It’s a noble aim to allow multiple image uploads, but the convenience is lost if the thing does not even work.
IMO, Magento should still be in beta.