Flash problems in Firefox

I mentioned in the podcast that I was having problems viewing Flash stuff in Firefox and I blamed it on KDE. I may have jumped the gun here, because the same issue started cropping up in GNOME. I went on the Linux Mint forums and other users were having similar issues. I’ve run the code that they suggested in the terminal, but I’m not sure if it worked because the problem doesn’t manifest instantly – sometimes it takes over half an hour before websites that run flash white themselves out.



5 Comments

  1. I wish I could say this was just your experience, but Adobe is pretty notorious for having horrible Linux support. I had heard for a while that 64 bit Adobe Flash was better, but so far in my experience it is not. Usually a quick Firefox restart will fix things up (at least for a little while), but until Flash starts to die off (or Adobe makes a proper Linux version) I don’t think this will ever get fixed.

    At least Silverlight (moonlight on Linux) has started to make some headway in Linux ports.

  2. @Rothgar
    Yeah Firefox restarts work for me as well. It’s a real shame that so many websites are primarily Flash. I can’t even check hockey scores or highlights as quickly as I used to because the NHL website’s main page and scoreboard are Flash.

  3. I think that you have that backward there, Sasha – It’s a shame that Adobe hasn’t seen fit to write a version of Flash for Linux. Even though we’re trying to change it, we’re a very small portion of the desktop market. You can’t exactly expect the entire ‘net to avoid Flash just for Linux. I suppose that the same could be said about Adobe, but it’s easier to blame a company for a problem than to blame the Internet.

  4. @Jon F
    However, you will note the fuss that Adobe is putting up over no Flash on the iPhone and I would suspect that there are more Linux users than iPhone users. If Adobe put in just a fraction effort into Linux as they do in the mobile arena we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

  5. @Shayne
    Unfortunately, the iPhone represents a highly visible market segment of paying customers that gets regular news coverage. For a company like Adobe, not supporting that platform is a public relations nightmare. Linux may have a larger user base, but is far less visible to the public at large.

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