Any alternatives to Adobe Flash player in Firefox?

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TallyMan
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14 Aug 2010, 7:10 am

This is sucking so bad now it isn't even installable any more in Firefox 3.6.8 (Windows Vista)

I'm trying to update to the latest version of the Adobe Flash player due to the old version having critical security flaws. However Adobe no longer simply provide the updated version - they try to push some sort of Download Manager which just crashes/hangs and takes Firefox with it! I had to reboot the computer and Firefox had kicked out the Adobe Download Manager! Repeated attempts to download and install this latest crapware from Adobe also fail in the same critical way.

I already use the No-Script and Flashblock add-ons anyway to restrict the flash videos to those I actually want to see. This latest Adobe screw-up means I've got to use the old security flawed version of the Adobe Flash player and risk getting a virus/malware or switch to some alternative?

Can anyone recommend some alternative plugin/add-in that plays flash within webpages please?

(I already use download helper to download such files and VLC to play them, I'm just wanting something to play them within web pages)


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CTBill
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14 Aug 2010, 8:08 am

Here's the standalone installer (no download manager):

http://fpdownload.adobe.com/get/flashpl ... player.exe

Took a while to find it--they don't make it obvious! :x



Orwell
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14 Aug 2010, 9:27 am

Adobe software is always going to be riddled with security holes. Luckily, Flash is obsolete and is going to fade into nonexistence soon enough. Firefox 4 includes WebM support for HTML5 video, and more and more web video is going to be encoded in HTML5 rather than Flash.


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TallyMan
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14 Aug 2010, 9:38 am

CTBill wrote:
Here's the standalone installer (no download manager):

http://fpdownload.adobe.com/get/flashpl ... player.exe

Took a while to find it--they don't make it obvious! :x


Many thanks, that has worked fine and I'm now on the latest version! :thumleft:

@Orwell, I'll be glad when Flash has gone too. I've long since got rid of the bloated Adobe PDF reader. Just this cursed Flash player now!

It is a pity that "Free Download Manager" doesn't download YouTube videos as it claims to be able to do! I have to use the crappy download program that comes with Firefox for some reason which is useless for handling broken downloads.


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polarity
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14 Aug 2010, 10:13 am

Downloading videos can be a real pain, as a lot of places don't like you to do it. Simple fact is though, if you can see/hear it, you can copy it.

There are sites like keepvid.com, that will give you a link you can use to download videos, or programs like URLSnooper2, but for some videos I've had to resort to running a packet sniffer on the web browser's requests to find out the actual file location on servers in order to download them, and not just the link to some file that does a redirect to them (without actually containing the location). You can also look at your cache folder to see if the videos are being copied there temporarily (put about:cache in the firefox location bar). You'll probably have to set the cache size pretty high, and poke around in the more obscure firefox settings to get files to turn up there though (about:config in location).

I'm happy to say that through persistence, I've yet to come across a video on a website that I couldn't copy to my hard drive to view offline.


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