Flash not installing?
 

I recently noticed that for some reason, Flash objects weren't playing in Firefox for me. After a bit of tinkering, I decided to uninstall and reinstall the Flash player. This didn't work--the installer went about extracting its files, but then nothing. No confirmation message, nothing. So I went into the Firefox plugins folder, and found nothing relating to Flash except a GetFlash.exe file. So I ran that, wondering if for some reason it failed. It runs, downloads the files, and then quits at 100%, asking me to check my internet connection. I've made sure that there's nothing (to my knowledge--possibly something on the university network, but I can't affect that) between it and it's download, but it still gets to 100% and fails.

Any ideas? Any way to manually install the plugin? I haven't found anything about this from googling, but it's incredibly annoying given Flash's prevalence on the web. I'm running Firefox 1.5.

EDIT: Just updated to Firefox 1.5.0.1, and no change. It's weird--it's not telling me that there's a flash file there and that it doesn't have the player. It's like it loads the file, and tries to play it, but just shows white space. It even sizes the page correctly around the flash file, but just won't play it. I'm totally baffled.

Are you using adblock? Disable it temporarily.

(Note your firefox memory footprint before disabling it, then after. That thing leaks like a sieve.)

Nothing. Same problem as before :(

What version of Flash? (about:plugins) Does it show as enabled?

What other plugins? Disable the others & quit/run FireFox.

Did you recently install/upgrade Quicktime? If you look at the following link, it sounds like these people had a similar problem, and it was combination of Adblock and the Quicktime plugin causing the problem.

<a href="http://www.brainstormsw.com/weblog/archives/120">http://www.brainstormsw.com/weblog/archives/120</a>

It's telling me version 8.0 r22.

I tried deleting everything out of the plugins folder and installing flash, and nothing changed.

Yes!!! That fixed it! Thanks for the link!

Long story short, it turns out that for some reason Quicktime was trying to play the files, which explains why they would sorta show up but not actually play. Installing quicktime alternative fixed it.

Glad it's working for you. Here's another fix that doesn't involve installing the Quicktime alternative. It just requires going into the Quicktime plugin settings and telling it not to handle Flash files.