'Circumstantial' conflict between Mozilla Browsers and Flash - Macintosh

Full-Screen HTML and Flash = Choppy Soup

[Josefu]

I have this problem for all Mac mozilla browsers. My site's front page appears in the normal browser window, and when one clicks on an option (if javascript is enabled) a new chromeless window opens. Many of the pages have Flash content integrated into the HTML.

All works fine if I go directly to the flash-content page directly (without calling the 'chromless opener') but when I pass through the index and open a flash page in chromeless mode: the tweens are choppy, scrolls give me the beachball of death (I'm on OS X). I made a 'test' copy of a page on my server and stripped all code but pure HTML and it still wouldn't display correctly. Something is making the Mozilla code spin in circles, eating all my memory. Mouse positions?

...now that I think of it, this may have something to do with the ... name? ... I am giving the chromeless window... that's the only possibility I see but perhaps I missed something. I'll update this if it is indeed the cause - an odd bug worthy of mention in any case. Has anyone else had this problem?

[edited by: tedster at 10:25 pm (utc) on Aug. 5, 2004]

[Josefu]

I seem to have found what I think to be the solution (problem) myself.

That 'normal' toolbar'd index page I mentioned earlier has flash content. The link to open a new 'chromeless' window is in that flash movie. in the 'on release' actionscript that opens that new window, I halt all animation. The index page stays open in the background, with all movies halted, under the new chromeless window. The new window has flash content as well.

It seems that all Mozilla browsers for the mac cannot have two windows with flash content open at the same time - it eats all the display memory for some reason. After thorough testing I found that actionscript calculations for animations were running in real-time, but the affichage (their display on the monitor) was lagging way behind.

I still don't know if there is a solution outside of closing the first 'background' window, but I do know that when I do so everything in the newer chromeless window runs normally.

[tedster]

Wow, that's some detective work.

Even though you solved it yourself, thanks for letting us know what you found out. Someone with a similar problem may be very glad to find your comments some day.

[Josefu]

I'm hoping that Mozilla will have a look into the matter, but they don't seem to care that I posted the above to their message board.

Even with yesterday's Netscape 7.2 release, having two flash-content windows open in Mac OS X will hog most all CPU activity - most usually resulting in the oh-so-lovely spinning beachball of death. To a point where even mouse activity and key commands (within netscape) go completely ignored.