502753 - Embedded Flash will be initialized multiple times if the "position" attribute of a parent container is changed.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 90268

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Ryan Hanna]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/2.0.172.33 Safari/530.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11

If a flash object is embedded within a DIV container, and the "position" style attribute of the container changes then the flash object will be initialized a second time. This second initialization can potentially cause ExternalInterface hooks between actionscript and javascript to be broken.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create an HTML page that embeds flash content with a DIV container.
2. Specify no "position" attribute in the style of the DIV container.
3. Add javascript to the HTML page that will modify the position of the DIV container to be "absolute".
4. View the page and notice that the SWF will be initialized twice.
Actual Results:  
The flash object will be initialized twice.

Expected Results:  
The flash object is only ever initialized once.

Comment 1

[Ryan Hanna]

Attachment: Sample HTML and SWF that will demonstrate the issue.

Comment 2

[u88484]

Can you reproduce this using Firefox 3.5?

Comment 3

[Ryan Hanna]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Can you reproduce this using Firefox 3.5?

Yes this issue has been reproduced in 3.5, if it helps it also occurs in 2.0.0.20

Comment 4

[Sahab Yazdani]

For what it is worth, I can reproduce both the provided test cases and variations of it using Firefox 3.5.5 and Flash 10.0.32.18 (btw. Thanks Ryan, we were really scratching our heads to as why this was happening in our application, and your workaround worked great). For me, any JS code that triggers a state transition on the position property of *any* ancestor element of the Flash element triggers a re-initialization of the Flash object.

More interestingly though, IE7 exhibits a similar problem where if you change the display property of an ancestor element through JavaScript, the ExternalInterface expandos of the DOM become undefined. I will attach a test case for this when I get home tonight.

Comment 5

[aravindm]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.3a4) Gecko/20100407 MozillaDeveloperPreview/3.7a4
eporter, Please update if you are able to still reproduce with the latest
nightly build ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Please stop asking people whether they can "still reproduce" bugs if they're trivially reproducible using the testcase in the bug?