403917 - FireFox will not show iframe in front of Flash movie except with wmode="transparent"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 111920

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Zvi Schreiber]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9

On IE you can have two <div>s one with a Flash movie and one with an iframe and the iframe can float in front of the Flash.  On FireFox this only works if the Flash movie has wmode="transparent" which should not be required for an iframe IN FRONT of the Flash - without that the iframe does not show on FireFox.  

Using wmode="transparent" is not an acceptable workaround because it kills performance and wmode="transparent" has lots of other serious problems, see:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347185
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312920
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306473
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347185
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389678
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401440

In http://g.ho.st/vc.html we are currently using the wmode="transparent" and you cannot type key combinations like Shift+Tab or non-English characters.  If we remove wmode="transparent" then iframes don't work e.g. go into the guest account and open Go Menu/G.ho.st Services/G.ho.st Browser 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

This is by design

Comment 2

[Zvi Schreiber]

I'm pretty sure my bug is valid - we have spent a lot of time trying to work around it - why did you mark it as duplicate of an invalid bug?

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

because it's by design that z-mode only works with a windowless plugin.
see also http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Gecko_Plugin_API_Reference:Drawing_and_Event_Handling

Comment 4

[Zvi Schreiber]

Hi Matthias

Thanks for the response.  Can we reconsider that design decision.  More and more plug-ins are using windows but that doesn't mean they don't want to show other web pages in front of them using iframes.  Also people are doing this because IE supports it.

Zvi

Comment 5

[Stanley Sokolow]

This bug is not resolved in my opinion.  According to the line of reasoning expressed above, the bug is not a program bug in Firefox, but rather is an HTML programming error by the web page author.   However, this reasoning does not explain why the Windows version of Firefox displays the drop-down menus in front of flash but the Linux version of Firefox displays the drop-down menus behind (obscured by) the flash movie.  As a test case, I saved the home page html file of www.rhapsody.com, which shows this faulty behavior when rendered by Firefox on Ubuntu and openSUSE Linux, but which does not obscure the drop-downs when rendered by Firefox on Windows XP.   Using the saved home.html file, I viewed the very same html code in both Firefox versions (Linux, Windows).   Sure enough, the Windows version of Firefox shows the drop-downs; the Linux version obscures them behind the flash panel.   Thus, the problem not in the html, but rather in the way that the browsers are rendering the same html with different results.

This bug has been mentioned in various bug reports here and at Ubuntu's bug site for years, and perhaps on other Linux distributions' sites that I haven't checked.  It seems to be a real bug and should be re-opened and given a fairly high urgency for fixing it.  The obscured drop-downs are not just a cosmetic problem -- they make these menus unusable.  Won't somebody pick up this bug and run with it after all of this time?