This has to be one of the weirdest issues I’ve encountered with Flash so far. wmode=transparent does not play well with Firefox. It breaks textfields. First of all it hides the flashing cursor on focus, which is annoying enough (that has been known for a long time). Sometimes it’s not even possible to write in the textfield as it becomes magically locked. But another bug cropped out that simply boggles my mind: it makes the keyboard mappings completely screwy and all non-standard characters become broken.

This is going to sound very weird, but stay with me. I’m on a French keyboard. If I type é in a textfield it comes up as é. But if I write ç it doesn’t write ç, it writes a Y grave (no keys on my keyboard for that one). If I type Shift+6 instead of getting an interrogation point (like is standard on French keyboards) I get a caret ^. All I can say is WTF? I asked Stéfane Furano of gotoAndPlay() to double-check and indeed it does the same thing on his computers, though IE on PC and Safari on Mac are fine. Here’s a minimal test case:

With wmode=transparent

Without wmode=transparent:

By typing in those fields on a non US-English keyboard you will surely notice the same bug as I. This is beyond my comprehension. My advice: don’t use wmode=transparent.