Flash objects restart or disappear when its container is re-styled

Question

I've created a jQuery plug-in that allows a selected panel of a web page to be pinned to the top of the browser view-port when the user scrolls a long page after passing a particular horizontal point on the page.

When the panel is pinned or unpinned, a strange thing occurs: if a Flash SWF object is present as a descendant element of the container, the Flash object either restarts its animation or disappears completely.

The pin or unpin change occurs when the CSS property "position" switches between fixed, absolute and static. This forces Firefox to redraw its elements and it causes the <object> to reload and reanimate the Flash movie. I read this post with interest: http://alexw.me/2010/12/firefox-problems-with-javascript-animation/

Does anyone know of a workaround that prevents the <object> tag from reloading? I admit the Flash is an ad, but this problem only occurs in Firefox. Although there are suggestions that this may be a bug, I have searched without success and I'm scratching my pate with a deadline fast approaching.

Thanks in advance!

Peter

Answer 1

This is a known bug in firefox itself... Actually its been listed on their bugzilla reporting system since 2001 and still has not been fixed, and probably wont be fixed by the looks of it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90268