Windowless Mode
Oh yeah, this beta also introduces some other features that may be of interest to some people. There's this thing called windowless mode, a.k.a. wmode, a.k.a. transparency, a.k.a. proper stacking order,
a.k.a. DHTML/JS menus unroll over a SWF vs. under, such as on the main Adobe website:
A.k.a. fullscreen Flash overlay ads! Yes! They're on Linux now. Let me tell you, I have
never been so happy to see one as when I first got one to work in Linux. I suspect the novelty will wear off rather soon.
To be clear, there are 3 major modes for SWFs embedded in webpages: 1) Windowed mode, which is the only one supported by the Linux Flash Player up to this point; 2) windowless/transparent mode; 3) windowless/opaque mode.
CommunityMX has this great, simple page that illustrates the differences between the 3 modes. (There are also 2 new wmodes introduced in Astro -- direct and gpu -- that are already supported in Linux where allowed by hardware.)
Thanks to both the
Firefox and
Opera teams for their support in implementing wmode. That's right-- this feature will work on both Firefox and Opera on Linux. For Firefox, you must have version 3. For Opera (as of this writing), you will need the latest beta of 9.50. Thanks also to
Swfdec for implementing this feature concurrently, helping to attack wmode from many angles and bring Linux web browsing up to ~2002 standards.
Be advised that there are still some wmode-related problems, most notably
this crash issue. Please report any other consistently crashing URLs.
