New Flash Player Breaks sIFR

Adobe's new Flash Player (version 9,0,115,0) does not work with earlier versions of sIFR 2. Mark Wubben, the current maintainer of the sIFR code, sent out an alert early this morning notifying everyone on the sIFR developer list. The problem arises when a designer has specified a hover color to a link. If they have, it breaks. Mark wrote the following to everyone on the list:

sIFR 2's links do not work with the new Flash Player 9,0,115,0 if a hover color is specified. This has been resolved in sIFR 2.0.4.

If you use sIFR 2.0.3 and have a hover color specified for links, you are advised to upgrade immediately. No modifications have been made to the JavaScript, you only need to re-export the Flash movies.

If you're using sIFR 2.0.2 or older, and have a hover color specified for links, you are advised to upgrade immediately. You must upgrade the 'sifr.js' JavaScript code and re-export the Flash movies.

sIFR 3 is not affected by this issue.

As Mark mentioned in the message, there are two things you need to do to upgrade your sIFR 2 implementation. First, you need to update (replace) your sifr.js file. Second, you need to re-export your font(s) using the updated 2.0.4 Flash file.

You can learn more about the update at http://novemberborn.net/sifr/2.0.4. Also, if you haven't already, you should check out the latest sIFR 3 beta version. We use it on several websites, and it seems to work well on all of them.

Update: "There's a very minor update for a very silly Safari 3 regression" – http://novemberborn.net/sifr/2.0.5

In Safari 3.0.4, XHTML documents do not expose properties such as `document.location` and `document.cookie`. sIFR requires on these properties, therefore I've added an explicit check for `document.location`. This disables XHTML support in Safari 3.0.4. The properties are correct in the recent WebKit nightlies, but another bug prevent sIFR from correctly inserting the Flash movie into an XHTML document.