From: stormreaver
Written: 2010-07-05 16:24:08.42283
Subject: Flash Player

After I installed Kubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), Firefox would freeze (not crash, just freeze) every time I left a page that contained any Flash content. It didn't matter if I use the back arrow, closed the tab, or even tried to close the browser. If the page I was leaving contained Flash, then Firefox would freeze. Much to my chagrin, Konqueror suffered the same problem. The usefulness of my web browsers suffered tremendously.

Today, I once again tried to solve the problem (I had tried a few times already, with no success). In retrospect, it seems obvious now that I should have initially followed the path I'm about to show you, as it fixed my problem.

I typed "about:plugins" in Firefox, and noted that it was showing libflashplayer version 9. I loaded KPackageKit, and looked for the Flash Plugin. KPackageKit showed only version 10, not a single instance of version 9, so there was no way to uninstall version 9 through the package manager. Puzzled, I searched Google for a way to remove version 9, and stumbled upon a posting by someone with similar symptoms to mine.

Following the instructions I found there, I typed "locate libflash", and noticed that I had a version of libflashplayer.so in ~/.mozilla/plugins. I deleted the Flash file from that directory, then used KPackageKit to remove and reinstall Flash 10 (I'm not sure if this part is strictly necessary, but it didn't hurt).

I then went to a few Flash based web sites without Firefox freezing. Typing "about:plugins" in Firefox now showed version 10 installed. So the problem turned out to be a version of Flash that I installed a couple Kubuntu versions ago (8.04 or 8.10) that was taking precedence over the system-wide version. I have no freezes, no crashes, or any other Flash-related problems.
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