[CentOS] CentOS - Firefox and Flash

Thu Jan 22 14:36:24 UTC 2015
James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca>

On Wed, January 21, 2015 14:27, Fred Smith wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 01:37:43PM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
>> So, how does one enable flash video and audio in Firefox-31.4.0esr?
>
> One installs the flash plugin from Adobe and configures firefox to
> either run it automatically when needed, or to ask if you want
> to allow it to run, every time (which helps prevent malicious
> crap from using flash unnoticeably).
>
>

If one has already done all that and, following the most recent FF
update, all that is displayed is a video window with the Flash
logo/Button in the middle.  And regardless of how many times one
clicks on said button no video will show or sound will emit, what
then?

I went into YouTube and switched to HTML5.  Then, and only then, the
original problem videos would play when revisited.

This is not much of an annoyance for me since watching YT is not very
high on my list of things to do.  Curiously, in many cases linking to
a YT video though an outside website allows videos to play when
directly accessing the same video from the YT site displays the
symptoms reported above.

I realise that Flash is post-consumer agricultural waste for the most
part and that it is riddled with security flaws.  And I realise that
FF is 'not for the enterprise' to quote one of their official
spokesmen and is regularly updated to block 'dangerous plugins' to
prevent the children running FF from injuring themselves.  But, I have
staff that are reporting similar problems when trying to access
training videos on other sites.  Systems with more recent versions of
FF fail to play while those people with older versions have no
problem.

Unfortunately we work in a regulatory regime that requires constant
updating and the government contractors providing the updates tend to
use Flash as their preferred platform, albeit not on YouTube so the
html5 setting is not available in those cases.  So, I need some way of
overriding this 'fascist nannyism'.

Is there a way to stop FF blocking Flash or do I revert to older
versions of FF to regain the functionality?  I am fairly confident
that Canadian Government is not going to pay to have this material
redone in OGG/OGV/OGX.


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