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Firefox and Adobe Flash CONFLICT

  • 2 replies
  • 10 have this problem
  • 17 views
  • Last reply by JTrainor

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Firefox is my favorite browser by far, but the Firefox issues with Adobe Flash are a major nuisance that goes on and on.

If under the plugins section of the Firefox Add-ons Manager I chose the "Always Activate" option for Shockwave Flash, then YouTube videos play automatically - I do not want YouTube videos to play automatically. But if I chose the Ask to Activate option in the Add-ons Manager, YouTube doesn't auto play as I prefer, but at other sites I'm forever being asked if I want to activate flash, then if I say yes, the box pops up asking, Allow Now or Allow and Remember? A continual pain. What is the solution? Thank you for any help. I'm using the latest Firefox edition, 54.0.1 (64 bit).

Firefox is my favorite browser by far, but the Firefox issues with Adobe Flash are a major nuisance that goes on and on. If under the plugins section of the Firefox Add-ons Manager I chose the "Always Activate" option for Shockwave Flash, then YouTube videos play automatically - I do not want YouTube videos to play automatically. But if I chose the Ask to Activate option in the Add-ons Manager, YouTube doesn't auto play as I prefer, but at other sites I'm forever being asked if I want to activate flash, then if I say yes, the box pops up asking, Allow Now or Allow and Remember? A continual pain. What is the solution? Thank you for any help. I'm using the latest Firefox edition, 54.0.1 (64 bit).

Chosen solution

One solution would be to remove Flash Player entirely, but I think you want to keep it for websites that still require it.

The reason for these repetitive questions is those permissions can be overridden per page/domain. Since you may want to "block" the Flash plugin from being used on YouTube only, did you try opening the Page permissions and change them for YouTube?

You would need to:

  1. Set Flash to Ask to Activate
  2. Visit any YouTube page
  3. Right-click the page, choose View Page Info
  4. Click the Permissions panel
  5. In the top entry for Activate Plugins, select Block

See the Firefox Page Info window article.

However, if you don’t want to have YouTube videos to play automatically, that may be unrelated to actvating Flash since they will play by default using the HTML5 player even when blocking Flash. For that purpose, you can set the media.autoplay.enabled preference to false in about:config by double-clicking it. There is also the FlashStopper add-on, but a) I don’t think you need it, and b) it suffers some issues currently, though they will probably be fixed soon.

Does this help?

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Chosen Solution

One solution would be to remove Flash Player entirely, but I think you want to keep it for websites that still require it.

The reason for these repetitive questions is those permissions can be overridden per page/domain. Since you may want to "block" the Flash plugin from being used on YouTube only, did you try opening the Page permissions and change them for YouTube?

You would need to:

  1. Set Flash to Ask to Activate
  2. Visit any YouTube page
  3. Right-click the page, choose View Page Info
  4. Click the Permissions panel
  5. In the top entry for Activate Plugins, select Block

See the Firefox Page Info window article.

However, if you don’t want to have YouTube videos to play automatically, that may be unrelated to actvating Flash since they will play by default using the HTML5 player even when blocking Flash. For that purpose, you can set the media.autoplay.enabled preference to false in about:config by double-clicking it. There is also the FlashStopper add-on, but a) I don’t think you need it, and b) it suffers some issues currently, though they will probably be fixed soon.

Does this help?

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Tonnes, you are a very knowledgeable and a great help! Thank you!!