Friday 28 September 2012

Chrome on Android - Permanent Desktop User Agent

I used to use my tablet quite sporadically to view website as there were no good browsers that really would provide me with the same experience as the desktop ones. However, once Chrome released their beta Android browser that has started to change. I'm slowly ditching my laptop and using my tablet to browse the web. Love it!

There is one little issue that I find with Chrome - it by default uses Mobile User Agent and a lot of websites redirect you to a mobile site. To mitigate that issue Google added a button in settings where you can "request desktop site". It is a good fix, however it doesn't stay permanently on and you have to do it per each site.

After some research I found an app that solves that problem - Chrome UA Switcher Lite. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appo2.ua

Monday 24 September 2012

DIV Overlay on Flash

I have had my client come up to me with a very weird issue that only seem to be happening in Firefox.

Website that I'm working on has a lot of overlays (mostly with iframes). When an overlaying window opens it normally greys out an area underneath it by using DIV that stretches across the whole screen (standard practise).


Problem: Main page has a large flash animation right in the center of the page. When overlay is showing everything on the background BUT the flash is being greyed out. Therefore the DIV is not covering the Flash object.

Browsers Affected:

  • Mozilla Firefox 15.0.1

    Solution
    My first gut feeling was that z-index is not set correctly, however after quick play around with firebug I discovered that this was not the case here.

    Secondly I started playing around with Flash object tag since I have heard of WMode that is usually causing this sort of issues. I saw that parameter "WMode" is already set to "Transparent" which is what it should be.

    I had to dig deeper. After couple of hours of testing different approaches; order of divs, z-indexes, different parameters for object I finally found my missing puzzle.

    Both object parameter as well as embed tag need WMode set to transparent. Simply setting just object parameter doesn't work!