Flash player not working in Firefox no more

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

Hey guys,
Is it just me or did your flash player stopped working in Firefox too?
I've tried adobe flash, and also tried freshplayerplugin (https://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-plugins/freshplayerplugin) which should make use of the flash inside chrome-binary-plugins (https://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-plugins/chrome-binary-plugins), still no go.

I also tried compiling freshplayerplugin from source (https://github.com/i-rinat/freshplayerplugin) myself and point it to the location of libpepflashplayer.so that too doesn't work...

In chromium flash works fine though, what else can I do?

(For the record, I use ffmpeg and not libav bTW)

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

Answering my own question, it seems that the latest version of Firefox (40.0.2) is the culprit! downgraded to stable version and now both types of flash player works...

davidm · Guru Joined: 26 Apr 2009 Posts: 557 Location: US

Hello, I am using Firefox 40.0.2 and adobe flash seems to be working fine for me.

http://www.chemgapedia.de/vsengine/help/en/flash/

www-client/firefox-40.0.2
www-plugins/adobe-flash-11.2.202.508

jburns · Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2015 12:56 am Post subject:

When you built firefox did you build it with the gstreamer-0 USE flag?

Xywa · Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2015 8:38 am Post subject:

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

That's great input guys, well I don't use bindist (use-flag) and I didn't compile with gstreamer-0 so it might have something to do with it.
I'll try the gstreamer-0 use flag now and see whether there's any change...

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

Well, gstreamer-0 didn't do the trick. Also it's not reasonable that it would have (yet I've tried nevertheless) because: I didn't have the gstreamer 0.10 packages, without those packages - flash still works in Chromium and lastly, I have another PC with Ubuntu on it and flash doesn't work there either - on firefox 40.0.2

This starts to get real interesting since you guys says it works for you, so the question is:
do you all have 40.0.2?
are you using bindist use-flag or not?
do you use multilib profile?
what architecture do you guys have 64 / 32 bit?

Perhaps the answer hides inside one of these questions...

Xywa · Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2015 11:21 am Post subject:

jhon987 - try for the moment firefox-bin if it works.

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

davidm · Guru Joined: 26 Apr 2009 Posts: 557 Location: US

EmaRsk · Apprentice Joined: 07 Sep 2004 Posts: 158 Location: Italy

It works here too (~amd_64, multilib)

firefox:
- version: 40.0.2
- USE flags enabled: gmp-autoupdate, gstreamer, jemalloc3, jit, minimal, linguas_en_GB, linguas_it
- USE flags disabled: anything else

adobe-flash:
- version: 11.2.202.508
- USE flags enabled: cpu_flags_x86_sse2
- USE flags disabled: abi_x86_32, kde
_________________
Please, avoid some common spelling errors:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling

Tony0945 · Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 2:57 am Post subject:

I heard that Firefox is blocking flash. I had no videos, then I uninstalled flash. Videos work fine without flash. Good riddance to that security hole. Firefox 38.2.0

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

Alright folks,
I have no clue what's wrong with my Firefox then, I have ~amd64, multilib profile and as for the useflags:
# equery u firefox | grep +
+custom-optimization
+dbus
+gmp-autoupdate
+gstreamer
+jemalloc3
+jit
+minimal
+pulseaudio
+startup-notification
+system-icu
+system-jpeg
+system-libvpx

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

Tony0945 · Posted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 3:57 pm Post subject:

I switched to Palemoon http://gpo.zugaina.org/www-client/palemoon www.palemoon.org with Shockwave Flash ESR 13.0.0.309

Works great and I don't have to rearrange my user interface every time there is an update.

Installing from the overlay was a trial. Wish it was in the tree.

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

So, I've tried taking this debugging one step further and recompiled Firefox with debug use-flag. This is what I get upon entering a website with flash:

Tony0945 · Posted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 8:38 pm Post subject:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2947898/security/mozilla-blocks-all-flash-in-firefox-after-third-zero-day.html

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

Tony0945 · Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2015 12:32 pm Post subject:

Excellent, jhon987, excellent. Apparently, the developers felt strongly that the code should be single threaded at that point. There are several possibilities.

1. The assert is wrong and a bug should be filed.
2. There is a problem with multi-threading but it's not apparent from your test cases (the videos you have watched).
3. This was the method used to kill flash.
4. (It's too early to think of more, I haven't had any coffee and I'm not a morning person)

That was very good work tracking through that code's muck. I've been trying to wade through the palemoon ebuild to see if CFLAGS is actually used, without success. If it's not used then why spend over an hour building from source? But that's a digression.

By all means, file a bug and post a link here to it.

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

Took me a while to do it but here's the bug report. Hopefully, the maintainers won't linger as I did...

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=562388

jhon987 · Apprentice Joined: 18 Nov 2013 Posts: 297

I can tell all who are interested in this bug that it was solved thanks to another Gentoo user, see his comment in the bug report.
As a matter of fact, the solution also fixes many other "quirks" I experienced lately, so props to that user about that as well.