421526 - Firefox doesn't work fine with a Swf that has "wmode" set to "transparent" or "opaque"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 272847

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[michel morin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

It has been reported many times and for years but basically, when wmode (windowless mode) is not set to default on every windows versions, several bugs occur :
- flash player can't get the mouse wheel events from firefox.

- text input doesn't work fine. on every non ASCII keyboards, you can't type characters that are usually accessible with SHIFT or ALT or ALT GR. 
This is a MAJOR ISSUE : you simply can't have a form work correctly then.
For exemple, on the french keyboard, to get the "@", you have to press Alt Gr + "à",AltGr/Shift/CTRL Keys seem disabled, so in the flash player you get a "à". Basically, you can't enter an email address in a form in this case which is VERY ANNOYING.

more info about wmode here : http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_15523


Please solve this bug, it's been a real pain in the ... since i started working with flash (6 years ago) !


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. set wmode to "transparent" or "opaque" in the html.
2. try to type non Ascii characters with some foreign keyboard



Here are some old posts from Jeff Mott from adobe about this bug.
You should really consider getting in touch with adobe for solving it :

Jeff Mott   2006-08-04 09:27:23 PST

We have several open bugs on this in the player bugbase.  I went back to look
at my old notes, and here's what I wrote about a similar issue with French and
Japanese:

[jmott 12/2/04] Adding info about French problems - some characters (like %, |
or >) just can't be typed. For example, '%' is supposed to be generated where
'"' is on the english keyboard

Netscape - NPP_HandleEvent does not forward WM_IME_*. FOL - Bugzilla bug
272847.

[jmott 12/2/04] Windows IME not displaying is FOL per Microsoft tech support -
we went around with this back in 2002.

Investigating french keyboard input not working.
[jmott 12/2/04] French issues are Netscape only!
[jmott 12/2/04] French issues due to NPP_HandleEvent not forwarding WM_CHAR -
we fake WM_CHAR in WM_KEYDOWN.
[jmott 12/2/04] This is also FOL, and I've added it to the bugzilla bug. The
only way around this is to code up a custom shift table for every language we
support, which just doesn't seem worth it.


Jeff Mott   2007-12-17 13:01:08 PST

We still have the original problem, which causes this bug and bug 272847.  When
the control is running with wmode = opaque or wmode = transparent Firefox stops
dispatching WM_CHAR (and WM_IME_*) events which the player depends on.  See the
test case provided for 272847 - Neither German ALT Gr input nor IME based input
works.

Comment 1

[michel morin]

Attachment: example files with an input textfield

these are example files with an html page that has wmode set to transparent.
You can't type special characters with a non ASCII keyboard and you can't scroll down the text with the mouse wheel.