Flash doesn't work in Firefox

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Sun, 08/14/2005 - 2:40pm.

Firefox is my browser and I'm proud to admit it. The availability of features, the breadth of extension and the simplicity of use make it a good choice, but when things go bad, they go bad quickly.

My flash plugin quit working in Firefox, but it sort of quit working. Sometimes it'd work. Other times it wouldn't. This went on for about a week and then it completely died. Instead of seeing flash, I'd see nothing.

I tried to fix it by doing the following:

1. Reinstalling the flash plugin. You can reinstall the flash plugin for Firefox at any time by going to the Macromedia site. After reinstalling twice it didn't help.

2. Disabling and then uninstalling the Media Player Connectivity extension. The media player connectivity extension for firefox allows you to control how media is played in your browser. I disabled and then uninstalled this extension with no luck.

3. Disabling and then uninstalling to Click to View Flash extension. The click to view flash extension for firefox allows you to hold flash playing in your window until you click on it. It's great for avoiding ads from Yahoo or MSNBC. I disabled and uninstalled with no luck.

4. Disabling and then uninstalling the Adblock extension. The adblock for firefox extension allows you to mark certain areas of your screen or content as an ad. This was the ads won't display in your window. I disabled and uninstalled this with no luck.

5. Ensuring Quicktime wasn't grabbing the flash. Did you know Quicktime can play flash? I didn't. Nonetheless, I made sure that the options to play flash wasn't enabled inside Quicktime. You can do the same.

I had no luck doing any of these steps and had to reinstall Firefox and my extensions. Even that didn't help as I started to receive windows errors and firefox would terminate when I went to a flash page.

While I cannot explain why my flash died originally, I was able to find out why flash was causing firefox to terminate. It was due to the adblock extension.

According to the Mozilla Knowledgebase, you should disable the OBJECT TAGS option from adblock. I have no idea what this does, but I do know that by disabling the object tags option you limit the functionality of adblock.