Workaround for Safari Blocking Flash Initiated Pop Ups

Ali Mills — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:59:00 -0700

Update: Please see my announcement of a project based on the ideas in the post here

Uncontrolled browser pop ups suck, and I’m very thankful for pop up blockers. There are times, however, when you want controlled pop ups. It’s these times – the times when a user initiates the call to action – when the browser’s pop up blocker should let them through. Browsers are pretty good at managing this when the user initiated action starts in HTML, and most also do a good job when the action starts in a SWF. There’s at least one big exception – Safari.

The standard path in Flash to open a browser pop up is to use ExternalInterface to call a JavaScript function in the wrapping HTML page that contains a window.open call. This path works in all the browsers I tested in except for Safari, which leads me to believe this a Safari bug.

Luckily, if you want to open browser windows from a SWF in Safari there’s a workaround other than disabling the “Block Pop-Up Windows”! Check it out:

The workaround works by:

assertTrue: Workaround for Safari Blocking Flash Initiated Pop Ups

Workaround for Safari Blocking Flash Initiated Pop Ups