I had posted about flash plugin controls not working in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala 64 bit here. I had moved to Ubuntu 32 bit for quite sometime and recently made a move back to Ubuntu 64 bit. I found the same problem with flash plugin controls in Ubuntu 64 bit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I haven’t found any specific patterns to when it does and when it doesn’t. If someone has, please do share.

In my previous post regarding the issue, I had suggested the installation of Adobe flash player 64 bit version from Adobe Labs website. The solution worked fine for me and it seems for most of the others, but the plugin was experimental and when someone needed to update, it was not available via repositories. It has been provided in a launchpad ppa repository currently which can be added by adding ppa:sevenmachines/ppa to Repositories in Synaptic, but it seems it is not updated as of now and the latest version available in the ppa is 10.0.45.2 while Adobe has already released version 10.1rc4. But since the latest version is not recognized by youtube, I think we should stay with the version in the repository.

Simply open up synaptic and navigate to Settings>Repositories>Other Software and click on Add. In the apt-line, enter ppa:sevenmachines/flash and close it. Then Click on the Reload button. Now, search for flashplugin64-installer, mark it for installation and click on apply.

When done, restart firefox and flash should run fine.

Please share your flash player 10 experience in Linux.

I am using Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on my Desktop with Firefox 3.5 as my primary browser. Recently I was facing problems playing online media (streaming mp3s, non-flash) including FM from my own page on Firefox.The fix was to remove all of the plugins mozilla-plugin-vlc and install only either mozilla-mplayer or totem-mozilla (or both).

Hope this helps.

I use Firefox 3.5.3 for my day to day browsing on my Ubuntu Karmic Koala Alpha (with KDE 4.3) and recently I experienced tremendous slowdowns making it less fit for use. I use a lot of addons including Firebug and Greasemonkey and it is no surprise that Firefox is slower than one without any extensions. I cannot move to Google Chrome or Epiphany because of the dependency on various add-ons such as Adblock Plus, Lastpass, Greasemonkey, Firebug and others and so I had to look what I can do.First and foremost, I thought the theme I was using (Default theme on Kubuntu) was one of the problems and thus I got this theme called iFox Smooth theme instead. Not only it looks nicer, that solved half of my problem. After I restarted Firefox, I felt like I was using Google Chrome or Epiphany. It is really smooth.

Then, I went on to History (Edit>Preferences>Privacy on Linux and maybe Tools>Preferences on Windows). If you use Lastpass or other password manager and bookmark what you need, you will probably not require History. You can disable it or change settings to maintain history for just or few days or disable history completely by checking the “Clear History When Firefox Closes”. This should improve load times and overall performance of Firefox. But make sure you know what you are doing.

Also, you can disable add-ons you rarely use and enable only when required. Also uninstall add-ons you don’t use at all. I did. You know how they can accumulate over time and we fail to acknowledge that we’ve had more than enough.

And you have probably heard a lot about tweaking network parameters of Firefox via about:config, so I am not going to talk about that here. Find it somewhere else.

Also, some people also insist on changing the content.switch.threshold to 100000 to make Firefox more responsive, but I barely felt a difference. However, you can give it a try too.

Other Information:
If you are on Windows, you may try SpeedyFox. I have not tried it though, but some of my friends say it works. This is not benificial if you opted to keep no history though.
If you are on Windows, slowing down of overall system (including firefox) may probably be due to viruses. make sure you run latest antivirus with latest update definitions.

Hope this was helpful.

Please find the latest post here.

UPDATE Nov 2, 2009: If you want to make flash work normal in 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, the following commands shall help. So start your terminal and get going:

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sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-installer flashplugin-nonfree swdec-mozilla mozilla-plugin-gnash
cd /tmp
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
tar xf libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
sudo mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

and restart firefox. If this does not work or you want to keep track of what has happened here, read on.

UPDATE Nov 2, 2009: The problem persisted for me even after I upgraded to the latest version. Using 64-bit flash plugin from Adobe Labs helps for me now. For this you will need to download the latest plugin from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html and extract it to /home/YOUR_USER_NAME/.mozilla/plugins or /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. If you intend to extract it to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins then you will need root privileges. One way of getting root privileges is launching nautilus as “gksu nautilus /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins” in the Run Application dialog (Alt+F2). Then copy the extracted libflashplayer.so in that directory and restart Firefox.

UPDATE: I had problems with swfdec-gnome also. When I used to close any tabs with active flash content, firefox would simply crash. I removed it and installed flashplugin via flashplug-installer (in synaptic) and now it is working fine. I disabled some plugins and maybe thats what worked. Not sure. Anyone came up with whats actually happening?

ORIGINAL POST 10 Aug, 2009: I recently installed Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) alpha 4 amd64 version and have been facing problem with flashplugin for Firefox 3.5. The flashplugin is a large download (as it depends on 32 bit libraries.. they have 32 bit version of the plugin now in amd64 too) and does not work well with YouTube videos, the flash applications do not respond user clicks. I have removed flashplugin via Synaptic Package Manager and installed swfdec-mozilla instead (firefox restart required after you do). This one has worked fine for me till now.

Hope this was helpful. Hope this is solved in the stable release.

Thanks to “Fatal Toenail Infection”.

I have Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope 64bit and wanted to give Google Chrome Browser a try to see what it feels like to be running Google Chrome OS (which will be based on Linux and run Google  Chrome Browser).

UPDATE Nov 21: Just adding the repository:
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable main
will let you install Google Chrome right from Synaptic.

UPDATE: Now I have Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) alpha 4 and same works for Karmic too.

So I headed over to Google Chrome Linux Page. Since Google Chrome for Linux is under development and public releases has not been made, I headed to Developer Channel Version Page. Then, I downloaded the Dev channel (for 64-bit systems) and then installed it. If you have a 32-bit processor or 32-bit OS, you will need to download the 32 bit version. I double clicked the downloaded deb file to install it and it was available in the Applications > Internet menu.

UPDATE: For Karmic Koala except for installing deb package as gdebi-gtk crashes (this bug) when trying to install this package. To install, you should use sudo dpkg-i packagename.deb from the terminal to install.

On first launch, it asked me if I wanted to import settings and history from Firefox and I chose to. It is good enough so far. I am using it to post this thread too.

However, flash has not been enabled and I could not play videos on Youtube. So to install and enable it, just type in the following commands (you must have flash plugin installed in Firefox for the following commands to work). Open op the terminal and copy\paste or type in the following commands:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/google/chrome/plugins
sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins/
/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --enable-plugins

Source: http://jeanderuelle.blogspot.com/2009/07/enable-flash-on-google-chrome-linux-dev.html

UPDATE: You will need to append --enable-plugins at the end of the launcher or menu item if you want it to load with flash plugin enabled each time you launch Chrome.


It is lot faster and lighter than Firefox 3.5 and Swiftfox. Of course, I miss the add-ons in Chrome and will still use Swiftfox as the default browser.

Firefox 3.5 is out for other OSes however the final version is not available for Linux. This is how you install it on your Jaunty Jackalope installation. We will use the terminal for this. It is just a copy and paste from here to your terminal so it should be fine.

Installation

1. Add the mozilla repository: (Copy all the lines before step 2 at once, it is just a single line split because it was long. You may use triple click to select the whole line.)
sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

2. Add the launchpad key:
a. Get launchpad key updater
wget "http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1113424/launchpad-update.tar.gz"
b. Extract it
tar -xf launchpad-update.tar.gz
c. Install it
sudo mv launchpad-update /usr/bin
d. Add keys
sudo launchpad-update

3. Update your package list:
sudo apt-get update

4. Install
sudo apt-get install firefox-3.5

Enter password when required and answer yes/no questions appropriately and it should be no problem.

Launching the new browser
Now, after it is installed, you can launch it from Applications > Internet > Minefield 3.5 Web Browser and it will be called Shiretoko (I don’t understand the brand names.. Minefield, Shiretoko.. for the same firefox-3.5? whatever). You may even launch it by doing a Alt+F2 and typing in firefox-3.5. And it should check for add-on compatibility and find updates to your add-ons. Choose to install the available updates.

Add-on Compatibility
But you will find some add-ons are not compatible and will therefore be disabled. To fix this, grab Nightly Tester Tools add-on and restart your browser. Now, goto Tools>Add-ons and then click on “Override all compatibility” on the lower right. This should fix the Add-ons so that they work with firefox-3.5.

Nightly Tester Tools Overide Compatibility in Firefox 3.5

Restart the browser and everything should be working.

Firefox 3.5 as the default browser
Also, you’d like the default browser to be firefox-3.5 instead of firefox. To do that, goto System>Preferences and select Preferred Applications. Now, in Web Browser, select Custom and then replace firefox %s with firefox-3.5 %s. Now, your default browser is firefox-3.5.

Firefox 3.5 as the default browser

You will also like your HTML files to open with the new firefox-3.5. Right click on any html file and then select Properties. In the Open with tab, select Minefield 3.5 Web Browser instead of Firefox Web Browser.

Firefox 3.5 as default for HTML Files

More on Add-on Compatibility
We have seen how to make the old add-ons, that were already installed, compatible with the new browser by using Nightly Tester Tools. But what about the add-ons that were not already installed and that are not marked to be compatible with the new firefox-3.5 (like the add-on here called cookieswap.. as of now, it is marked as not compatible with firefox-3.5)?

Cookieswap

We have a workaround and that will be to launch the older firefox 3.0 and then instead of clicking on the Add to Firefox button, right-click instead and Save>Link>As. Now in Firefox-3.5, goto Tools>Add-ons and then drag and drop the downloaded xpi file onto the Add-ons window.
In case you have removed the older firefox and then you may use either User Agent Switcher to switch the User-Agent header to older version of Firefox or just use firebug to display the hidden download div. If this is difficult for you, go with the first workaround.

Hope this helps. Have a good day.

Please post any comments, suggestions, questions, corrections or feedback.