Description of problem: Flash has been fixed (v. 9) so that it will no longer crash X with alphas. The bug was in gtk 1.0 (if I remember correctly), which hopefully was fixed as well. It is time to remove all hacks (which shouldn't be hard coded anyway) that block ALPHA containing images, animations, etc. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): firefox-2.0.0.2-2.fc7 How reproducible: Easy, go to foxnews.com, most shopping sites that use flash, etc. They won't show the image.
Um, it is time to what? Not quite sure what you're asking us to do.
To remove the hacks. I know RH/Fedora removed the proper hack in the shell script, but it appears that the hack that is in Firefox code to disable RGBA plugins, etc. is still in place. Flash won't work properly and show the images as black (and video as black) if it has ALPHA components to it. Sorry for not having been clear.
Since you seem to know what the hack is, do you care to share?
I remember seeing a few things. I saw the patch once, looking for it now. I remember Fedora/RH change logs stating that they didn't need the RGBA workaround in the shell (but were leaving it in anyway) because it was now in firefox. export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 was the shell work around. If it was just foxnews, I would think it was their problem, but several shopping sites have the same problem (black windows or nothing). I cannot find the firefox source code work around. Maybe I am remembering that incorrectly, but I believe I am not.
When you will find out what's the problem, please, let us know. Putting this into NEEDINFO(reporter) for now, so that we know, that ball is on your side of the table.
I'm the one that would have added any hacks in. I really have no idea what you're thinking this other hack is. The only "hack" I added was the environment variable that was subsequently removed from rawhide when flash 9 was released to the public. Here are the relevant changelog entries. * Thu Jan 18 2007 Christopher Aillon <caillon> 2.0.0.1-3 - Remove the XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 workaround; the plugin got fixed. * Sun Sep 03 2006 Christopher Aillon <caillon> 1.5.0.6-10 - Enable GCC visibility - export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 as a temporary workaround to prevent a broken Adobe/Macromedia Flash Player plugin taking the X server.
The hack I was thinking of supposedly was done by mozilla group, not by anyone at RedHat/Fedora. Let us just close the bug because I am still unable to find what I am sure I saw and I have been using bugzilla and LXR on mozilla, I cannot find it. I do not know therefore why certain sites don't work in Linux. Thank you for your help.
I'd recommend filing bugs specifically about what doesn't work rather than requesting some unknown code to be removed. If it was done upstream and the problem also affects upstream versions, I recommend filing a bug upstream. Do you want to do this? Going to close this one.
It does affect upsream. Once upon a time I knew exactly what code. I am sorry about this. It affects websites that have alpha in video and certain other things. Foxnews's video streams are just one such site with problems. Leave it as closed.