In Flash Player 8 a lot of the work I have done on the Rolex suite of sites has worked fine, once the Flash Player 9 update came out we noticed some very mysterious Javascript errors and only in IE on a PC. The error was very undescriptive, Syntax Error Line 53. The other odd thing was nothing broke, all of the javascript was executed, and all of the actionscript was executed. We were simply doing a call down to a javascript that executed some tracking and analytics calls. It was a very basic ExternalInterface.call method call. We even commented out everything else in the Actionscript and Javascript functions. We still saw the error. Using Microsofts script debugger we discovered that the javascript error is in the Javascript that the Flash player appends to parent.window, this javascript is used in the communication between flash and the browser.

I put a call into Adobe/Macromedia support and they confirmed it is a bug in Flash Player 9 and will be fixed in the next release. Unfortunately they couldn’t tell me when the next player will be released. This bug isn’t documented on the Flash Player 9 bug page, however another strange and unrelated bug is. If you have a hyphen in the your swf file name ExternalInfterface communication will not work. I hope this is not a sign of what is to come with the Adobe future.

Let me know if anyone else has run into this issue.