*** Update, it appears Macromedia already had a mechinism in place for you to set this… but left it out for some reason!? See the comments in this entry (exactly 1 year later… whack yo!). I guess advertisers would get pissed if you could easily turn this off.
The property to see if Flash Player has windowless mode off (meaning, you are blocking floating Flash ads) is:
System.capabilities.windowlessDisable
Naturally, it’s false by default. If you save the mms.cfg file with the steps below, it’ll trace out true… even in the IDE.
***
Via ASVGuy & Gregg Wygonik
Gregg found some documentation in the Flex LiveDocs on how to disable the Flash Player’s auto update feature. This is helpful for IT Admins.
Burak KALAYCI(ASVGuy) dug a little deeper, and explained a little bit about the mms.cfg file and how it works for those admins. He ended on the property responsible for allowing the playback of Flash movies that have their wmode (window mode) properties set to transparent or opaque. The former is what allows the Flash adds to appear over web pages.
As a Flash developer, I’d prefer you not installing Flash blocking software, so below is how you do it. This may cause other problems with existing, legitmate Flash applications, so make a shortcut to this file so you can easily turn it off again. Opaque Flash movies, as Gregg said, will appear as a black square. I do not know, currently, if this works only for the Flash 7 player in Internet Explorer, but it’s a start.
1. Find your required folder:
Windows NT, 2K C:/WINNT/System32
Windows XP C:/WINDOWS/System32
Windows 95, 98, or ME C:/Windows/System
Macintosh /Application Support/Macromedia
2. Make a text file in the folder called “mms.cfg”
3. Put this text in it, and save it
WindowlessDisable=1
Tested here, and it appears to work for both opaque and transparent Flash movies. Just to help Google out, here are some other keywords as they are also called “floating flash ads”, “flying flash ads”, and my favorite “those damn Flash ads!”.
“floating flash ads” reminds me of Dune (“send in the floating fat man”) and Apu from The Simpsons (“why you floating fat man!”)
a quick test seems to indicate that FireFox 0.8 doesn’t obey this setting – though it also appears that FireFox doesn’t support transparent Flash movies anyways (at least not in my quick testing).
g.
Yes its possible to use transparency with firefox but about your fix i don’t know.