I had to do some serious googling to find this out. After ofcourse having pulled half my hairs out thinking it was me who forgot something critical. Like embedding all special characters. Or using swfObject, etc.
For a really long time there’s been a bug in the Flash Player in several browsers., and it hasn’t been fixed by Adobe it’s not in Adobe’s control to fix this, since: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-479
It affects all Input Fields on not showing the correct User Input, especially for Specialchars.
In my case I was making a contactform in flash on my new fullscreen transparent portfolio site (to be released soon). When you were typing an @ sign for you email adress, it just didn’t appear!
Appearently when using WMode Window all works fine, but when using WMode Transparent it all screws up in every browser except Explorer! Can you believe that?! Flash browser independant…my ass! When will browsers finally start using the same standards?!
Uh OH!!! http://tinyurl.com/c8ttpf
Asking the browser to do stuff is hard, because they all have fringe behavior.
In this case we’re asking the browser to accept plugin input directly into its own compositing stack, instead of blasting direct to screen.
Weirdest WMODE problem I’ve seen has been one where asking the browser to print the webpage would print the SWF upside down. Others have had accessibility differences.
If it’s just in Player, we can fix it ourselves. But if it’s in the communication with the browsers, it’s harder.
I’m sorry you lost time on it though. :(
jd/adobe
John, thank you very much for this reply. It’s great to see how Adobe spends time explaining these situations to the community.
That you replied so quickly on this blogpost, shows Adobe cares much about the quality and experiences of their technologies. Always nice to feel there’s a human face in this ‘giant’ corporations.
It are indeed the browsers who harm themselves in this continues non-stop browser wars. Not handling standards all together. It woud save the web from a lot of trouble, if they would.
Don’t worry about my time :D hairs enough on my head …still ;)
Oh damn… I wasted a day on this same issue for the Vaio10 contest! Bad communication ;)
A solution exists, it consists in getting keyboard entries with javascript and then pass it to flash :
http://analogcode.com/p/JSTextReader/
AS2, not AS3 but it shouldn’t be too hard to convert
Thx Antoine, yes I knew about JSTextReader, sadly enough it doesn’t work for webkit based browsers…Safari, Chrome, etc.
I rather change my concept then using hacks like these, which have a very temporary lifetime anyway. But some people may be ok with this solution indeed.