Browser Compatability Part 2

Today I spent most of my day trying to figure out the intricacies in browser compatabilty (especially when it comes to adding Flash into the mix). For the longest time I have known that to add Flash to a page and try to have DHTML menus hover out on top of the Flash movie that you needed to set the Flash movie wmode to either opaque or transparent. This allows the menus to appear on top of the Flash movie in the DOM.



The issues I was running into today was a user that could not get the menus to work while using Firefox 2.0.0.16 while in Ubuntu Linux. This is definitely a small section of our users but I figured I would at least look into the issue and see what was happening. The first thing I noticed was that the menus were flying out below the Flash movie. I thought this weird since I had coded the HTML to allow for them to fly out above. I did some searching and found that Linux does not support the transparent or opaque modes for Flash movies. There is suppose to be support coming with Firefox 3 and Flash 10 that will finally allow for the same compatability for Linux users.



Second issue was users on Firefox on the Mac could not see the Flash movie load at all. The interesting thing with this one was that I needed to set the wmode to window in order for the movie to show up at all. Of course this caused some funky behavior with the menus and I did not want it to do that for Firefox on Windows so I hade to use a Javascript hack to determine the OS version through the navigator.appVersion property and parsing out Mac and setting the object and embed code for that to use the window wmode and for windows users to use the regular transparent wmode.



What gets me about this is how incompatible things really are between OS's and Browsers. The same browser version will act totally different on a different OS and different browsers on the same OS will render things completely different. For having standards for many years now, you would think that things would be a little more, well standard. Some of this promises to be improved through IE8 and Firefox 3 as well as Safari 3. Firefox 3 will bring Linux into line with the standards and seems to improve having to code around Firefox on the Mac.



As a side note, I also noticed that there can be issues with Firefox on an Intel Mac. Just something else to be aware of when trying to design your site to reach the maximum amount of people.



The easiest way for now to prevent most of these incompatabilities is to not mix DHTML meuns and Flash or Text fields with flash or DHTML menus. Those are the two areas that cause the most problems.