Siavash Ghamaty

Firefox 3 for the Mac

It looks like Adobe or Mozilla fixed some issues with the Flash plugin for Firefox 3 on the Mac, along with adding the “Awesome Bar”. One main issue was disappearing Flash in Firefox 3 where opacity would effect the embed. There is a fix for that particular bug by using a transparent PNG instead of the CSS opacity style. That fix works great, except that IE 6 does not like transparent PNG files, remember to use a PNG fix or just let them upgrade to IE7.

Firefox 3 has addressed this issue with the plug in. Opacity on a layer will not make your Flash disappear anymore. At the moment I have found some other wierdness in the plugin where Flash in Flash applications will hide out certain undrawn areas. This does not happen on the Mac in FF2. I’ve mainly experienced this problem using the TabNavigator component in Flex.

I came across this problem building a widget for my current employer. Unfortunately I could not ignore the problem or crossed my fingers and hoped it wouldn’t bite me in the rear later. Researching this problem further on the internet, I could not find a comprable issue. So I began to debug further and noticed that FF 3 Flash plugin for Mac uses a large amount of resources. I ended up optimizing my Flash apps and bingo! No more disappearing Flash. Although optimizing code is always good practice, it shouldn’t be the solution for this case. My Flash shouldn’t disappear, if anything, I should lose frame rate. If anyone else has experienced this problem, please contact me. I would love to hear.