WiredRevolution.com » firefox

How to fix unresponsive Flash player on Ubuntu

Ryan — Sat, 15 May 2010 15:40:28 +0000

For a long while going back to Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10, and even the latest 10.4 lucid, there has been a nagging issue with the Adobe Flash player being unresponsive to mouse clicks. This bug stops you from interacting with Flash buttons or controls for example those in video players or games which is obviously very frustrating. Being such a high profile issue which affects many users it’s amazing that it has taken this long come up with a fix.

Here is the official bug on launchpad which concerns the flashplugin-nonfree package and mentions a couple workarounds.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/410407

So here is the bug and workarounds.

For example on youtube, whilst it recognises my mouse moving over various buttons, actual mouse clicks are not recognised. I can navigate using ‘tab’ but this is very painful. I can also right click. The problem doesn’t occur with other flash players, e.g. swfdec-mozilla.

WORKAROUND 1: Disable compiz
WORKAROUND 2: Remove flashplugin-nonfree / flashplugin-installer and install from adobe
WORKAROUND 3: Open a terminal and enter:

gksudo gedit /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer

Then add: export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 before the last line of text

Note: Chrome & Chromium are now working fine without workaround

These workaround’s have been verified to work for some users. We don’t need verification of whether or not they work for you.

To my knowledge it is still unclear what the underlying cause of this issue really is. But these workarounds are your best shot at resolving the issue until an official fix is released. The last workaround is the easiest and has the least impact on your system so I would give that a try first, it worked for myself.

Fix for missing title bar and GNOME panel with Firefox

Ryan — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:22:55 +0000

This is a bug in Firefox 3 where it launches into full screen mode and completely covers the top and bottom GNOME panels as well as its own title bar. While in this buggy mode Firefox cannot be resized, and can only be closed from within the menu.

File -> Quit

A temporary fix involves pressing F11 which switches you into full screen browser mode and pressing it once again to switch back. Once you close Firefox and restart it however it will continue to have the same issue.

To fix this bug permanently, delete the file localstore.rdf from your Mozilla-Firefox profile which is stored in your home directory. Firefox must be closed in order for this to work correctly.

In your home directory run the following command:

$ find . -name localstore.rdf

./.mozilla/firefox/9m0erq4m.default/extensions.rdf

Close Firefox.

Remove the file that was output by the previous command.

$ rm ./.mozilla/firefox/9m0erq4m.default/extensions.rdf

Restart Firefox.

After restarting Firefox will rebuild this file and your browser should work correctly once again.

Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

Ryan — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 03:49:05 +0000

This is the list of the most useful Firefox keyboard shortcuts. It is amazing how much more efficient you can be when your not always reaching for your mouse.

Controlling Tabs

New Tab – Ctrl+T
Close Tab – Ctrl+W or Ctrl+F4
Next Tab – Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+PageDown
Previous Tab – Ctrl+Shft+Tab or Ctrl+PageUp
Select Tab [1 to 9] – Ctrl+[1 to 9]

Searching Text

Find in This Page – Ctrl+F
Find Again – Ctrl+G or F3
Find Previous – Ctrl+Shft+G or Shft+F3

Other Commands

Full Screen – F11
Reload – F5 or Ctrl+R
Reload (override cache) – Ctrl+F5 or Ctrl+Shft+R
Select All – Ctrl+A

Change MIME settings in Firefox 3

Ryan — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:46:54 +0000

In Firefox 3 it is easy to edit the MIME settings. These settings are used to control what program is used by default to open each file type you encounter while browsing.

To edit these settings in Firefox 3 navigate these menus:

Edit -> Preferences -> Applications

For each file type on the left you can designate a program to open that file type on the right. You can also avoid opening a specific file type and choose to save it to disk by default instead.

Install Java browser plugin in Gentoo

Ryan — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:05:57 +0000

To run Java code on a Gentoo system you must have a JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed. The JRE will install a 32-bit browser plugin, among other things, which is necessary to take advantage of Java applets in Firefox.

Before we go any further, it must be noted that this will only work with the 32-bit version of Firefox. This is because the binary JRE package is only distributed in 32-bit and is therefore incompatible with the 64-bit version of Firefox. If you run a 64-bit system make sure that you have emerged the www-client/mozilla-firefox-bin package to get the 32-bit browser.

There are numerous JRE packages within portage, but the recommended package to emerge is dev-java/sun-jre-bin. Don’t confuse the JRE with JDK (Java Development Kit) which will add unnecessary Java programming tools to the installation.

To get the browser plugin you must enable the nsplugin USE flag when emerging the JRE. You can add this to your global USE flags by placing it directly into the make.conf file.

If you don’t want every package capable of installing a plugin to do so, you can limit the flag to this package only by adding the following entry to /etc/portage/package.use.

dev-java/sun-jre-bin nsplugin

Once the nsplugin flag is set to your liking then go ahead and emerge the JRE.

# emerge -av dev-java/sun-jre-bin

The ‘-v‘ and ‘-a‘ options will allow you view the USE flags that are enabled, and confirm they are correct before allowing it to continue.

If you are running an amd64 system then you will need to emerge the app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-java package as well. This package contains the basic 32-bit libraries needed to run the 32-bit JRE binaries on your 64-bit system.

You will need the nsplugin USE flag enabled for this package as well. If you didn’t add the keyword to your global USE flags in the previous step, add the following entry to /etc/portage/package.use.

app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-java nsplugin

Now emerge the package, again making sure the USE flags are correct.

# emerge -av app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-java

You will now have to configure your system to use the JRE with the eselect command utility.

Use this for a x86 system.

# eselect java-nsplugin set sun-jre-bin-1.6

Use this for an amd64 system.

# eselect java-nsplugin set 32bit emul-linux-x86-java-1.6

Once all of these steps have been completed you can verify that everything is correct by running.

# eselect java-nsplugin list

Available 32-bit Java browser plugins
  [1]   emul-linux-x86-java-1.6  current
Available 64-bit Java browser plugins

Check that Firefox has found the plugin by opening up a new window and entering about:plugins in the address bar. You should now see the Java plugin listed.