Flash Player Firefox Issues

BobSutan

BobSutan

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Apr 5, 2000
Messages
12,123
I've upgraded my mom's mozilla to 2.0 after she told me she was having problems opening her web-based email. It turns out the flash player plugins were never installed. I downloaded them from Adobe/Marcomedia's site, fired them up, and then they fail to launch. I get some filechecking and whatnot, but no actually installation.

WTF? How the hell does one go about getting this bugger installed? I could have sworn when I did this on my home system that it was done via a plugin. But with hers the only option appears to by via an application install. :confused:
 
Have you tried the manual install? I had the same problem with my Firefox too...until I switched to Opera.
 
Yeah, I meant going to Macromedia's site and downloading the installer and running it. Automatic meaning going through Firefox's automatic download through the extentions?
 
I downloaded the app from their site. When I double-click on it it just does a quick copying of files/extraction, but nothing actually happens...no installer loads, nothing.

**Edit**
I caught a glimpse of where the files were extracting to, the mozilla/firefox directory, and in there is the actually installer. Even after installing and rebooting, it still doesn't work. :mad:
 
Netscape-compatible install_flash_play.exe

When you run it, it just installs the files and exits. It should install NPSWF32.dll and NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe in your Firefox plugins directory.

It probably looks under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Mozilla Firefox 2.0\extensions\" for example to find the plugins directory.

Anyway, that's all you need for Firefox. The NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe ( in my testing at least) checks what ActiveX Flash version you have for IE and updates it if needed. It doesn't update or download npswf32.dll or anything for Firefox.

The flash installers are known for being retarded. I'm still waiting for them to fix the installer so that npswf32.dll is installed to a common place like "%CommonProgramFiles%\adobe\netscape flash plugin\npswf32.dll" or "%programfiles%\flash plugin" or something. That way browsers can just automatically include that in their plugin path by default. ( The adobe reader, quicktime, xstandard and other plugins already work like that.)

Instead though, the installer often misses in finding plugin directories. ( especially if you have 40+ builds of a browser installed. It might only find one. )

Further, the installer doesn't give you an option to extract where you want if needed.

You can create your own installer, but you can't distribute it, so the whole flash installer deal sucks.

If you install Firefox as an admin to the default location, you usually won't have a problem, but it's the other situations. :(
 
That's the exact same installer I used. Those are the exact same files that were extracted into the directory I mentioned earlier. Yet its still not being recognized by firefox. Is there a registry key, aside from the one above, that I should be looking for? What about another directory for the .dll's?
 
Try deleting plugin.dat and registry.dat in the mozilla profile directory. When Firefox restarts, new ones will be generated and maybe that will fix it.
 
Shadow2531 said:
Try deleting plugin.dat and registry.dat in the mozilla profile directory. When Firefox restarts, new ones will be generated and maybe that will fix it.
Click to expand...

That's going to be a problem. In the default/profile folder neither file exists.
 
If you don't have these files:

"%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\pluginreg.dat"
"%appdata%\Mozilla\pluginreg.dat"
"%appdata%\Mozilla\registry.dat"

, do

firefox.exe -profilemanager

and create a new profile. ( call it Test for example and make sure to uncheck don't ask at startup)

Load firefox with the new profile and see what happens.

Do you have any noflash greasemonkey scripts or extensions installed?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top