ever since i installed adobe flash to firefox it has been crashing on me, when i go to paticular sites. for instance the azurus download page. i go to it, and firefox just dies, instantly. any ideas?

Run Firefox from a terminal, and see what error messages you get before it dies.

Open up firefox put about:plugins in the URL bar and let us know if you have more than one version of Flash installed. What version(s) are you using? If you do have more than one version installed you should remove one of them.

Where do you have flash installed? If you aren't sure you can always use slocate or find to find out:

You can run this as a regular user, because the plugin should be readable for a regular user.

If you have the latest version of Flash, that may be at fault. Try downgrading to a previous version - there is another thread which addresses this, try a search of LQ for "downgrade flash" (minus the quotes).

I've seen this as well, but the newest version may work for you, elsheepo. It works great for me. I think the problem some people were having as seen in other threads was that they had more than one version installed, so look into this before you downgrade.

I have a similar problem with firefox flashplayer, so forgive me for cutting in the line and ask the question here.

I tried about: plugins and the result shows no flashplayer is installed, but this command below gives me different results:

I know I have two versions of firefox installed, but I don't know how to delete one of them. My distro is rhel5, and the yum update only gives me firefox-1.5.0.12, while I like the 2.0 version better, but obviously my manually installed 2.0 version didn't get registered with the system, so everytime it's the 1.5 version that runs. But I hand copied the libflashplayer.so to every plugins directory. So why does the browser doesn't recognize it?

PS, this is when I am logged in as a normal user, if I log in as root, then the browser can recognize flashplayer, however, the swfdec is again having problem.

about: plugins says this about swfdec:
Thanks a lot!

I wouldn't worry about any errors running the browser as root. You should never be doing this anyways.

Are you running a 64-bit machine? Do you intend to run 64-bit FF? From what I understand running 64-bit FF is a big pain because it is hard to find plugins that work with it.

I am assuming you are trying to run 32-bit FF regardless of what arch your machine is. If I'm wrong about this, I can't help you too much because I've never owned a 64-bit machine to tinker with.

I'm not familiar with RHEL's way of doing things, but I can tell you a good way to manually set FF up.

First, figure out where you are running it from now
That should be a symlink that points to one of the FF program directories (which in your case sounds like /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.12). The symlink will most likely be in /usr/bin.

Basically, to set up FF all you have to do is untar the official binary from Mozilla to /usr/lib/firefox-VERSION. Then you should make a symlink at /usr/lib/firefox pointing to the install you want to use as your main one. You probably already have a symlink at /usr/lib/firefox, so you should delete that first.
After this is done you need to place a symlink in /usr/bin or anywhere else in your PATH that you know if will get executed from.
The vanilla firefox does not look in mozilla's plugin directory for plugins. If you want to change that you need to add this somewhere in the firefox script (/usr/lib/firefox/firefox)
You don't need to do this if you don't want to, however. You could just put your plugins in /usr/lib/firefox/plugins.
~/.mozilla/firefox/plugins is also a part of the plugin path.

If you are running a 64-bit browser I don't think 32-bit plugins will work without some kind of wrapper. As I'm sure everyone knows, the 64-bit firefox will be under /usr/lib64 which is where your firefox 2.0 is.

Do note that you can run firefox from wherever it is untarred. Just cd into the directory and
It will try to use any plugins under its respective plugin directory.