Firefox, Mac and Transparency woes - pulling the FOSS strands together

It is often said that 3 things make a 'trend' in the modern world, so here are 3 very sneaky browser bugs triggered by 3 different Drupal modules that have crossed my path in the last few weeks, all (it turns out) quite likely related. Here they are, in the hope that if you see something similar you might be able to locate the problem a little more rapidly. All these bugs only appear on Mac OSX (both Tiger and Leopard it seems) when using Firefox 2 (I haven't tested version 3). Actually, I don't own a Mac myself, so a most of the actual testing and debugging have come down to other folk (thanks Sam and Gregory!). If anyone has the tools for the job, and can workaround any of these module issues or (most importantly!) fix the bug upstream on mozilla.org Firefox bugzilla, or at least confirm the status on Firefox 3 HEAD that would be a valuable contribution! I'll try and contribute where I can too - but I thought it would be really useful to draw the many threads together and raise some awareness. One of the great things about Free and Open Source software is how people can rally around issues in software that they build on (but don't normally code) and fix something that in a closed-source/commercial environment would be far out of reach and would need workaround upon workaround.

Bug 1: TinyMCE module/script

Symptoms: the rendered page is broken badly on scrolling, causing the form to be unusable. This happens more often when there is more than one instance of TinyMCE on the page, and also more often with the zen theme. Cause: Transparency on any disabled buttons visible in TinyMCE Issues:

• d.o: Module bug report (appropriately closed)
• TinyMCE: Script bug report/workaround

Status: Not fixed (in the current stable TinyMCE script, at least)

Bug 2: Admin_menu module

Symptoms: Almost exactly the same as bug 1 Cause: Transparency on the dropdown menus, perhaps also an overflow layout problem with fieldsets Issues:

• d.o: One admin_menu issue (apparently fixed)
• d.o: Another admin_menu issue (apparently still problematic)
• d.o: Field set issue
• d.o: A comment related to bug 3 - admin_menu causing SWFs to not appear

Status: Possibly fixed (the second issue seems to suggest that it is not - but we have had good results with recent versions of admin_menu).

Bug 3: Googtube, flashnode and other modules placing SWFs on the page

Symptoms: SWFs do not appear at all (including ones embedded from other sites, such as YouTube) Cause: wmode transparent parameter on object/embed tag and/or divs with opacity elsewhere on the page Issues:

• d.o: Flash node module issue
• d.o: General issue (probably admin_menu related)

Upstream issues and testcases

Obviously this is the best place if we are going to nail this bug once and for all. It would be great to check the latest builds to see if we can reproduce these issues there too - perhaps it has already been fixed. I read that the flash transparency issue (Bug 3) has, but I don't know about the other issues (that don't involve flash).

• A mozilla bugzilla search for potentially related bugs
• A bug showing the opacity issue with divs
• Another (dupe) bug showing the opacity issue with divs
• A bug showing SWF issue with transparent divs and wmode transparency
• A testcase showing the wmode flash transparency issue
• A Google search with several pages related to these issue
• A useful description of the flash issue: "If you set transparency per CSS in one of the wrapping elements, set transparency to your embed flash document and if you’re using Firefox on a Mac, your embed flash will be broken."