firefox flash-plugin automatic installation fails on youtube

This issue has been solved in Gutsy Final.

If i didn't understand correctly and your problem is the same as bug 173890 then please mark this bug as a duplicate of said bug. If I am still wrong, feel free to remove the Invalid status.

Confirming this is still the case on ubuntu 8.04.1 (amd64 version):
 - make a fresh install
 - start firefox
 - goto youtube.com

The youtube page will say it detected that flash is not installed and offers a link to adobe.com, which offers download of RPM/DEB packages.

David Balažic wrote:
> Confirming this is still the case on ubuntu 8.04.1 (amd64 version):
> - make a fresh install
> - start firefox
> - goto youtube.com
>
> The youtube page will say it detected that flash is not installed and
> offers a link to adobe.com, which offers download of RPM/DEB packages.
>
>
This is a duplicate of another bug already filed on LP. The reason it is
happening is because you are trying to use flash's plugin finder not
ours. We are working on getting ours to trump Adobe's but we are not
sure of Mozilla's stand on it nor Adobe's

I will look to see if i can find the orig. report.

The one you found that you thought was same its not.

Problem reproduced with Ubuntu Karmic alpha 5.

@mpt

I'm returning this bug to invalid as there seems to be a problem with ubufox itself on the Alpha 5 CD.

I've opened bug #427734 to track that.

Reproduced in Ubuntu 9.10 beta; reopening.

From the duplicate bug 387444, apparently this is deliberate behavior on the part of the ubufox developers: YouTube uses the Adobe Flash Player Detection Kit instead of standard <embed> code, and therefore ubufox does not put up the plug-in finder bar.

The Canonical Design team has just discussed this. Even if the Adobe Flash Player Detection Kit is "stupid" as described in bug 387444, we do not think that merely calling it stupid and doing nothing else is a reasonable or sustainable approach in the face of YouTube using it. And the experience of installing Flash via adobe.com is much less obvious or pleasant (.yum? .tar.gz? .rpm? .deb? .wtf?), and presumably less updatable too, than the experience of installing it from the Ubuntu (or Canonical partner) repository via the plug-in finder.

There are several ways this might be fixed.

One way would be to persuade YouTube to switch to standard <embed> code, like Google Video uses, possibly using the more complex Flash detection only for browsers where standard <embed> does not produce a reasonable installation invitation; and to persuade Adobe to change the Flash Player Detection Kit code accordingly. Have any Ubuntu developers done anything about this so far? If so, what?

A second way would be to special-case youtube.com video pages so that if Flash is not installed, the plug-in finder bar appears regardless of what is actually on the page. Yes, this would be a hack (for example, it would produce false positives if YouTube adopted HTML5 <video>), but no more of a hack than Safari's special-casing of youtube.com pages on an iPhone.

A third way would be for ubufox to patch the Firefox code that is triggered by the Adobe Flash Player Detection Kit, to pretend that the Flash plug-in is installed regardless of whether it actually is. Again, this would be a hack, but it would continue in a grand tradition of Web browsers pretending they do or don't support particular things for Web site compatibility.

well ... the ideas i had about detecting a flash detection kit would require hooks/code changes at quite central places of firefox ... i am not sure we will be able to do that upstream.

that said, there might be other - more workaround'ish - ways of doing this through maybe checking if there is a link to the adobe flashsite somewhere or maybe in some other way. needs some more thinking ...

this bug is triaged as its understood why this happens.

This bug is saved now.

I would suggest you to use Firefox with HTML 5 player on Youtube because for Firefox Adobe said they only provide 5 years security updates for flash and then they'll drop Flash support. So HTML 5 will be the future.

At least here on Ubuntu 12.10 LTS.