The death of the pop-up Flash

Running informal tests… on with the new Service Pack installed. I have noticed that the pop-up blocker is set to the medium level by default. It appears that if you try to launch a pop-up window on page load that it will block this. But if you call a pop-up window in Flash (like I do on my company website) in my portfolio, it still works. When the user sets the setting to “high” my portfolio pop-up Flash movies do not work at all.

I imagine there are alot of Flash sites out there that pop-up in a window right from a splash page that will not work now because of this Service pack. And I’m sure there are many web designers getting stressed out about this.

Solutions!

1. Don’t use pop-ups any more, they are typically bad for usablity. Making users loose the back and forward button is a no-no.

2. If you want to use pop-ups in Flash make sure you put a message very bold that you are going to start a pop-up window. This will at least let users know if the pop-up doesn’t work that… it’s the service pack that is causing problems.

As for my website, (www.airgid.com) I switched to a version recently that only uses pop-ups to show a full version of the Flash movie in the portfolio. But I am going to have to re-think this for my next version. Now that pop-ups are starting to become harder to produce on IE, we will all need to rethink how and why we use them.

After writing this article I have noticed that even Macromedia isn’t amune to the lovely SP2 security changes. If you go and try to install Flash, they now have instructions on how to deal with the new SP2 security blocks!. This means people probably won’t update their Flash plugin as easy. Not good news! For more information see the Microsoft Website