Lately I had been having trouble on flash-based websites where things just wouldn’t display properly - sometimes a screen would come up with the flash content, then just go blank. I was a little puzzled, but thought it more of the usual ‘not tested on linux/firefox’ issues from the web developers. But then it just started getting silly, and looked into it a bit. I remembered that a few weeks back, an update was available for the flash plugin (in ubuntu, the package is called flashplugin-nonfree) that upgraded from 9.0 r48 to 9.0 r115.

Turns out that most of the problems stemmed from that. In a thread in the ubuntu forums, it is stated that the current flash release is still pretty buggy. Kilz from the ubuntu forums has created a script that installs the plugin with the nspluginwrapper, for running in 64-bit installations. The thread in question is here. I tried it, first uninstalling the current plugin using the synaptic package manager, then ran the script. I now have the 9.0 r48 version, and it everything is running fine again.

Damn Adobe Flash - the majority of my linux usability problems have centred around getting the damn plugin to work in browsers at all, then to actually work properly. I can’t wait for the Gnash project to have a viable replacement up and running so I can dump Adobe’s product for good.