TechNote (Archived)

Macromedia Flash Player 6 update (release 79)

Macromedia released an updated Macromedia Flash Player 6 on March 3, 2003. This update contains release 79 for all platforms.

Macromedia Flash Player Release 6.0r79 addresses security issues and fixes a Daylight Savings Time issue discussed in Date object may report incorrect time during daylight savings (TechNote 15254). For complete details and latest version numbers see Macromedia Flash Player 6 Update.

To Download Macromedia Flash Player 6.0r79:

• For all users: The latest Plugin and ActiveX control installers for Macintosh and Windows are available from Macromedia Flash Player Download Center.
• For Macromedia Flash authors only: Plugin installers, ActiveX control installers, Standalone players, and Test Movie players, both Debug and Release versions 6,0,79,0 are available from Macromedia Flash Support Center Downloads.
  
  Note: Projectors created after updating the authoring tool players will also contain the update.

The following pertains to Macromedia Flash Player 6 releases r47-r50
Prior to release 79 Macromedia released an updated Macromedia Flash Player 6 in August 2002. This player update (release 47 for web players, release 50 for standalone players) came soon after Macromedia Flash Player 6 release 40 (July 2002). These two updates combined includee some new features and addressed a long list of known issues. The Macromedia Flash Player 6 Release Notes contain an overview of the major changes. This document outlines some additional changes that developers may encounter which are resolved with the Macromedia Flash Player 6.0r40 and 6.0r47(and 6.0r50) updates, some of which only effect specific platforms or applications.

Developers experiencing the below issues on playback should test with the latest Macromedia Flash Player, available from Macromedia Flash Player Download Center. Developers can also require specific player versions in order to ensure proper functionality. See Additional Information for details.

All Platforms

XPConnect for Netscape 6.2

LiveConnect is a browser technology that allows Macromedia Flash Player to communicate with the hosting HTML page. When the architecture of LiveConnect changed with Netscape 6, this functionality was lost in that browser. The new technology is called XPConnect. Macromedia has modified the Macromedia Flash Player to support XPConnect in both Netscape 6.2 and later and Mozilla 1.0 and later, enabling use of features such as FSCommand and javascript-to-Flash communication with these browsers.

Access to ID3 tag information of MP3 files

Macromedia Flash Player 6.0r40 and later supports MP3 files with ID3 v1.0 and v1.1 tags. The sound must be completely loaded in order to access this information. See the Macromedia Flash Player 6 Release Notes for details.

Support for masking device fonts

You can now use a movie clip to mask text that is set in a device font. The mask must be created via ActionScript (versus a Mask layer). See Macromedia Flash Player fails to read ID3 tags embedded in MP3 files (TechNote 16536) for more information.

AllowScriptAccess and Cross-Site Scripting

Macromedia has added a new parameter "AllowScriptAccess" to address a cross-site scripting security issue. If Macromedia Flash (SWF) content coming from one domain was embedded in an HTML page from a different domain, the SWF could read and transfer data, such as cookies, from the HTML server domain to the Macromedia Flash domain. For complete details on this issue, refer to Using AllowScriptAccess to control running of scripts from Flash (TechNote 16494)

Incorrect interpretation of HTML character entities

HTML character entities (such as ) were not interpreted correctly. When using the URL encoding (for example, %C4) the HTML text would not display. The encoded UTF-8 equivalent (%C3%84) would need to be used in order to display correctly.

POST method appends extra characters

On Netscape version 4.x browsers, Macromedia Flash Player was appending characters to the very end of a POST request (a carriage return, a null value, and the letter "C".) This issue has been resolved in the Macromedia Flash Player 6.0r40 Netscape Plug-in.

Sound.start() not functioning afterstop()

When a streaming sound had been started and subsequently stopped using stop(), the sound would not start again usingSound.start().

Text in fields "dances"

In some cases, when a Multiline Display Text Field using HTML formatting was animated, the text readjusted itself creating a 'dancing' effect.

Loading large amount of data fails

This applied to loading of data into a loadVars or an XML object. After submitting a POST request with a large amount of data (around 64k), and repeatedly resubmitting the request, the server could return a 501 ("Not implemented") or a 403 ("Forbidden") error.

Can't set volume of buffered streams

The volume could not be set on a sound which was being buffered.

Text field memory consumption

The Macromedia Flash Player has been changed to reduce the amount of memory required by text fields.

POST not functioning due to missing content-type

POST requests sent from Macromedia Flash Player Plug-ins were missing a content-type in the header. While many server-side scripts process this correctly without a content-type, the request is not understood or processed by some scripts (such as ASP or PHP pages.) An effective workaround is to manually set the content-type in the server-side page, however, the header issues have been resolved in the updated player.

Windows only

Intel Optimization

Some optimizations have been made that enhance performance on Intel P4 systems, including improvements for Antialias rendering (Quality settings), video, and video encoding.

Flash in e-mail not displaying in Outlook Express

When opening an e-mail containing Macromedia Flash content in Outlook Express, the Flash content would not display.

Flash embedded in Microsoft HTML Help files (CHM)

Flash content would not display when embedded in a Microsoft HTML Help file (CHM).

Crash when hosted in a Microsoft .NET application

Microsoft .NET applications crashed when hosting Macromedia Flash Player 6.

Shared object sometimes not created

A shared object was not being created if the target folder did not have the basic attributes of a default folder. Examples of non-default folder attributes are if the folder had compression enabled, or content indexing was disabled.

Username and password sent via getURL and POST not working (Netscape)

If a username/password was sent using getURL and the POST method to an ASP page, the data was not sent from Netscape and the login failed.

Named anchors fail in dynamic server pages (Netscape)

Named anchors failed if Flash content was embedded in a dynamic server page (ASP, CFM. for example).

Cannot interact with Flash on a layer in Internet Explorer 5 if using wmode

If the wmode parameter was used with Flash on a DHTML layer, interactivity was lost when the document was viewed on Internet Explorer 5.

Rapidly loading different DHTML-heavy pages causes intermittent crash (Internet Explorer)

Rapidly loading pages containing large amounts of DHTML and Flash with the wmode parameter could cause Internet Explorer to crash intermittently.

@ sign and other special symbols not working on German keyboard (Netscape)

If using a German keyboard, text fields did not accept input of the character @, along with other characters that required the use of Ctrl-Alt-<key>.

LocalSharedObjects did not work with query parameters

If the SWF was embedded in the HTML page with query parameters in the tag (for example,mydocument.swf?variable=value), then a local shared object call would not function.

Flash assets embedded into C++ default to "low" quality

If the ActiveX control was hosted in a C++ application, the quality of the document defaulted to "low". This has been changed to "high", which matches functionality of Macromedia Flash Player 5.

Print button not enabled (WinXP Home)

When printing from Macromedia Flash Player, the Print button would not be active or clickable without first clicking elsewhere in the browser and clicking back into the dialog box again.

Macintosh only

Shortcut keys not functioning with text

Shortcut keys (Command+V, Command+C, Command+X, Command-+A) would not work to select or modify text in a text field.

XML.sendAndLoad does not consistently return variables

An XML.sendAndLoad call would function correctly a few times, but further requests would not retrieve data.

useCodepage converts some text files to UTF8 as MacRoman and not Latin-1

The System.useCodePage method of Flash Player instructs the Flash Player 6 to convert text to the traditional codepage of the user's system (behaving like Flash Player 5). If using this method, during playback on Western Macintosh computers, the characters were incorrectly converted to the incorrect text encoding. As a result, the characters are interpreted incorrectly as other characters. The updated player correctly converts characters on Macintosh systems.

Additional information

This document is specific to the July 2002 release 40 and August releases 47 and 50. Macromedia may release a Flash Player update at any time, and a later version may be available. Find out about and install the latest release from Macromedia Flash Player Download Center.

Developers can use detection to identify or require specific versions of Macromedia Flash Player. Refer to How to detect the presence of the Flash Player (TechNote 14526) for an overview of detection methods. The Macromedia Flash Detection Kit is the recommended method of detection, and is periodically updated to reflect and enable developers to require the latest version.

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