flash player 9 caveat in FF

[davidh]

I had some problems with my Yahoo web mail and disabling Flash Player 9 seemed to solve it. (The Y! web mail usually runs a Flash Ad every time I go to mail.yahoo.com) So beware if you install Flash Player 9.

The problem did not show up right away so I can't narrow down the problem at all.

There may be an interaction with the "noscript" extension for Firefox. I'm using the latest Firefox and latest noscript extension as of installing flash 9 and noscript a day or two ago.

I did tell noscript to stop displaying the error message in the browser window when scripts are blocked. I did try putting that setting back to the default but it may not have worked (error messages seem not to appear even now, even tho' scripts are blocked). So there could be an interaction between "noscript" and flash 9 causing the problems.

I use flash so little in Firefox that I decided to disable it rather than try to diagnose the problem. So I deleted the NPSWF32.DLL from all 4 of my plugin folders
1. Firefox
2. Thunderbird
3. Mozilla
4. Netscape 4.8

but saved a copy on the desktop for a while in case I decide to re-enable it.

As far as I can remember, this problem did not happen with Flash 8, but I did not have "noscript" extension installed then. (The McAfee siteadvisor FF extension was probably not installed back when I had Flash 8, but I doubt that's the problem)

I'm not really interested in fixing this problem, just a warning to anybody who tries Flash 9 in Firefox.

And as we all know, all these programs have bugs in them and will have bugs in them til forever. Just hope zero-day exploits hit your computer AFTER you've patched whatever program it is.

I'm thinking I should try having "noscript" block all media (actually plugins), since there's no way I'll keep all the media players patched up to date unless I spend at least an hour a day reading security site notices :(

Anyway, it won't be long before most of the popular media player up to date versions will fail to run on Win 98 since MS stopped all support of Win 98 on July 11, 2006.

DH

[davidh]

I did tell noscript to stop displaying the error message in the browser window when scripts are blocked. I did try putting that setting back to the default but it may not have worked (error messages seem not to appear even now, even tho' scripts are blocked). So there could be an interaction between "noscript" and flash 9 causing the problems.


NOSCRIPT extension seems to be working fine now. So perhaps I was expecting an error message in a place where none would ever appear.

OTOH, it may also be that disabling Flash causes Flash to remain "undectected" in turn possibly bypassing an attempt by the browser run the/a Flash related Jscript? I.e. the warning msg, about "noscript" having blocked a script, may have been there before disabling Flash but not afterward.

Flash is such a nuisance. There are even non-commercial sites that open up with absolutely NOTHING on the home page but a Flash media. I suppose you could still get into such a site without Flash by searching google for a common English word within that domain. But then maybe the idiot web master used Flash for all navigation within the site so you'd still be screwed :(

DH

[Judy G. Russell]

Just hope zero-day exploits hit your computer AFTER you've patched whatever program it is.Sigh... seems that's almost all we can do... hope.

[davidh]

Maybe I spoke too soon. Even after disabling flash, I was still having problems with composing emails in mail.yahoo.com causing Firefox to crash. So I'll run with NOSCRIPT uninstalled for a while also to see if that helps. Sometimes the big bad guys are not the only "villains". Of course, Adobe does make money from Flash Player, unlike many of the FF extension makers, I think.

DH