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I am using 11.04 Natty and Firefox 5. Video card is ATI Radeon HD 4670 and I am using the newest proprietary driver downloaded from ATI website.

Some Flash apps, such as embedded youtube vids and a couple of other apps, are displayed incorrectly (i think with real embed instead of the new iframe embed). What happens is as a portion of the flash moves around, parts of it keeps blanking out. For the embedded youtube vid, it greys out. Some other apps turns transparent, showing the webpage's background.

portions of the progress bar, and the fade in Youtube logo greys out

The same flash apps runs perfectly fine for Google Chromium on the same computer. I have another computer with 10.10 Maverick, Firefox 5 and nVidia card and driver, and it they also run fine.

So, anyone has an idea of what is causing the problem?

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Are you running a 64-bit or 32-bit system? – Lekensteyn Jun 30 '11 at 21:33
I use 64bit system. the other computer that doesn't have this issue is 32 bit. – hansioux Jul 1 '11 at 2:01

2 Answers

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Try Flash-Aid, it's a Firefox add-on that detects the system and selects the appropriate Flash player for you, remove conflicting plugins and apply some tweaks to increase performance a fix common issues.

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it looks like you are the author of Flash-Aid. You sir are a genius. Thank you very much. – hansioux Jul 1 '11 at 2:11
Yes, I am the developer. Thanks for the compliment. :-) – lovinglinux Jul 1 '11 at 13:55
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NOTE FROM FLASH-AID DEVELOPER: Flash-Aid security issues addressed here have been fixed in version 2.2.0. The extension now uses SSL for downloading beta plugin data, there is no more redirection and beta plugin is only installed if hash value is authenticated.

While Flash-Aid (should) work, I personally do not like the way it installs Flash system wide. It also downloads the flashplugin via an unsecured redirector on updates.webgapps.org so it is possible that somebody tricks you into downloading and installing a malicious version of Flash (or something completely else) by using a MITM attack on a public network.

The actual fix for the initial problem seems to be that 32 Bit Flash on 64 Bit systems sucks. So all you need is the preview version of the 64 Bit version of Flash codenamed "Square". You can get it here. The compressed tar file contains a single file, libflashplayer.so. You have to put this file into the directory ~/.mozilla/plugins and restart Firefox.

I put a simple script to achieve this here. You can run it by calling

wget -O- https://github.com/mss/getflashplugin64/raw/10/getflashplugin64.sh | /bin/bash

Of course you still have to trust me not to do anything nasty, but at least you can be sure that nobody intercepts your download.

One thing you have to watch out for: The current Preview 3 is from November 2010 and carries the version number 10.3 d162. There was at least one security fix since then and the current version is 10.3 r181. I recommend to use Flashblock. You also have to keep this version of Flash up-to-date yourself.

P.S. to @lovinglinux: Feel free to reuse my script in Flash-Aid. Maybe you could add an option to install the plugin locally only. And you could request the update JSON file from your GitHub repo and get HTTPS for free. It could also return the required download URL which I parse from the HTML and you wouldn't need your redirector either.

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Thanks for the suggestions. I am currently discussing the possibility of migrating updates.webgapps.org to a VPS server with SSL support. I guess that would solve the problem. – lovinglinux Jul 10 '11 at 17:29
I am testing a new version with SSL support and other security measures. Simply put, there won't be redirection from updates.webgapps.org any more and the script will verify the file hash before installing. If SSL fails, the extension uses the urls hard-coded in the extension instead of the data from the site. – lovinglinux Jul 15 '11 at 0:08
Version 2.2.0, which includes the new security protocol, is already available for download. – lovinglinux Jul 15 '11 at 13:53
Thanks for addressing my concerns. – mss Jul 17 '11 at 16:10
You are welcome. Thanks for bringing that to my attention. – lovinglinux Jul 17 '11 at 17:33

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