Inspect flash object

[IanSt]

I've been using FireBug for years but have never been able to work out
how to inspect a flash object as the mouse click is always swallowed
by flash.
For example, imagine you are on YouTube and you want to look at the
object tag for the flash video. You click the inspect element icon
then try and click on the flash video but firebug doesn't register
that you've clicked the object so it doesn't highlight the code.
Is there a way around this?

[Mike Ratcliffe]

No, it seems like flash fails to relay the clicks and keypresses to
the browser ... I am not sure whether that is a flash bug or whether
it is by design. Not much we can do from the Firebug side though :o(

[Steven Roussey]

Could the frame showing the outline of what would be inspected be on
top and swallow the click before flash gets to it?

-s

On Jan 21, 12:22 pm, Mike Ratcliffe <mich...@ratcliffefamily.org>
wrote:

[Marc Weber]

Excerpts from Steven Roussey's message of Thu Jan 21 23:38:12 +0100 2010:

> Could the frame showing the outline of what would be inspected be on
> top and swallow the click before flash gets to it?

I think you have to do it the way the "Ad Block" or "block flash"
plugins do:
They all add additional layers you can click on instead.

Example:

[ catch me ]
[ THE

FLASH
CONTENT ]

Then when clicking on [ catch me ] you are beneath the flash object.
Of course this is not perfect but may be a quick hack which works.

Marc Weber

[Mike Ratcliffe]

That would be similar to the way we handle disabled elements, we call
the overlay a proxy element.

I have logged an enhancement request at:
http://code.google.com/p/fbug/issues/detail?id=2744

The big problem here is that the inspector is injected into the HTML
page and flash movies bleed through divs so I would need to cover it
with an iframe ... the problem with that is that once it is covered it
looks plain white. I will take a look at AdBlock Plus's implementation
and see if I can use anything from there but I suspect that it will
all be XUL and therefore will probably need to wait until the next
revision of the inspector.