Flash+Firefox+Mac+transparency=Uh oh

12th December 2007 | 0 Comments

So I was making a flash video lightbox today (and part of yesterday) and i kept running into a weird error in Firefox. Parts of the flash movie weren't showing up. At first I thought it was some weird issue with ThickBox, so I wrote my own lightbox code. But that exhibited the same problem. So I decided to test it in safari and was surprised to see it worked fine. A quick boot into Parallels and I found that IE and Firefox worked fine too. So now I was left with a Mac specific Firefox rendering bug.

It seems when you place HTML content over flash content, you cannot use the CSS opacity property. Instead you have to use a tranparent PNG and fake what ever you where doing. Not the ideal solution, especially considering that I had to use browser detection...yuck.