I'm back at work. Just finished processing 200 emails, not including flexcoders. Whew! I still have to reply to 22 messages.

The Flex FAQ is now live on devnet.

On my first day at work in 2006, I ran into an interesting issue: Firefox now blocks pop-ups from Flash and other plugins by default. It turns out that some smart people were using Flash to bypass pop-up blockers. With Firefox 1.5, the default value of privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins is 2 -- i.e. block pop-ups.

The same is true of IE6 on Windows XP SP2.

Not all pop-ups are bad though! On what basis does the browser decide if a pop-up is good or bad?

I don't know about IE, but Firefox has another setting called dom.popup_allowed_events that specifies the DOM events that are allowed to lead to pop-ups. The default value for this setting in Firefox 1.5 is "change click dblclick mouseup reset submit". If a piece of ECMAScript tries to open a new window on one of these events, the pop-up blocker does not intervene.

What does this mean for Flex apps? Well, if you're using getURL to launch a new window (_"blank" as the target), it may bomb if it's not a "good" one.

See the following Flex 1.5 example:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.macromedia.com/2003/mxml">
  <mx:Button label="Click Me"
    click="getURL('http://www.google.com/', '_blank')" />
  <mx:Button label="Hover Mouse Over Me"
    mouseMove="getURL('http://www.google.com/', '_blank')" />
</mx:Application>

Clicking the first button opens up a new window successfully; hovering the mouse over the second one doesn't.

Also check out popuptest.com.