Flash and other things Firefox

Firefox Firefox

Good ol' Firefox!

Flashing its awesomeness

Open Source, out of the box!

Tons of add-ons; take your pick

Slisha slow? Don't be a prick

Of features, there is no dearth

Caring for users since it's birth

This post is mainly about installing Flash for Firefox on a Linux-based machine (especially when you don't have admin privileges) and a few other things personal to my Firefox experience. Usually, in these kind of posts, we first have to write how to go about installing the concerned software. But there is no such thing as "installing" Firefox anyway -- Download. Extract. Browse! :P :D

I am sure there are several posts out there which explain the same. The heck with them!

Installing the Firefox Flash plugin

    So let's get down to business. To install the latest Flash, download it and extract it. You will find among other things, the jackpot file: libflashplayer.so

Scenario 1: You have admin privileges.

Execute the following code from inside the extracted folder:

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sudo cp -r ./usr /
sudo cp ./libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

The destination directory in the 2nd command above should be your Firefox plugins folder, which usually is /usr/lib/firefox/plugins. That should do it. Restart the browser. Restart the computer, if necessary.

Note: If you want to install Flash for Chrome, you can use Synaptic. :P

Scenario 2: You don't have admin privileges.

I encountered this case in the dept. labs where IceWeasel doesn't have Flash by default. Nor is it installed in the system, so even Chrome doesn't have it.

No worries! Run the following commands from the place where you extracted the Flash plugin earlier:

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# make sure you have a "plugins" folder under ~/.mozilla
cp ./libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/

Yup, that's it! Now you can enjoy online music services like Grooveshark, Jango, Gaana, etc. in DCF and put peace! Although my original idea was to enable Flash in Firefox 15.0 that I had downloaded, to my pleasant surprise, this method enabled Flash for IceWeasel also.

The problem with Flashplayer 11.2 and Firefox 14.0+

Those who have updated their Firefox recently would have noticed that many YouTube videos just don't play. Strictly speaking, it is a bug which has been filed and is being resolved, hopefully.

    In the meantime, I heard from one of my friends and also read online that downgrading your Flash might help. I tried that, and although most of the videos work fine now, but some still used to break down. But thanks to Kashyap, I found out that the problem was that YouTube automatically, without your permission or notifying you, enabled HTML5 if your browser supported it. So, basically, you have to opt-out of the HTML5 trial and everything should be fine.

    You can downgrade your Flash by downloading Flash 10.3 from here. To opt-out of the HTML5 trial, go to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and click the corresponding link at the bottom of that page. Happy smooth youtubing!

Speaking of which...

YouTube instantly reminds me of listentoyoutube.com. Basically, prefix any youtube url, say http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TMl5oCRjk, with "listento" to make it look like http://www.listentoyoutube.com/watch?v=j-TMl5oCRjk. By visiting this modified url, you can download the mp3 of the video. I use it all the time! I am sure there are add-ons to do the same, but this also gets the work done in a few clicks.

    Then there is just-cannot-live-without add-on called keysnail. It is the emacs-counterpart of Vimperator, although you can customize it to Vim keybindings as well. Personally, I feel Vimperator is an overkill, and the worst thing is: I cannot use the awesome gmail keyboard shortcuts. If you haven't yet tried keyboard shortcuts while using gmail, you are missing a lot of fun, not to mention losing precious productivity! To intsall keysnail, download the xpi file from the link above and drag-n-drop it on your Firefox. Voila!

    Well, then there is the Firefox back-up add-on named FEBE. Pretty neat and it works without much fuss! Back-ups all your history, bookmarks, add-ons, etc. etc. I just love my History ;) and my Bookmarks, so this add-on is very important to me. Apart from that, for those of you who spend a lot of time on Google Reader, there is Feedly. It is pretty awesome -- sorts articles by popularity and stuff. Give it a try.

    I hope at least some of these tips, tricks, etc. help you improve your Firefox experience. I know most of you have given up already :-| And yeah, special thanks to Sujeet for putting fundaes on the Flash thingy and for blog-htmlize :-)