Actually, I’m not poking at Adobe this time. Say what you want about how Flash has ruined the Net, and I’ll agree. But people expect to have it working.
The breakage here is that Firefox never has been much good at this in Linux, particularly on 64-bit. I’ve had it working briefly on a few distros, but almost always as a result of running a 32-bit browser with a 32-bit plugin on a 64-bit OS. Silly, no? The whole advantage of 64-bits processing for most users is the improved handling of sound and video.
So, on both CentOS 5 and openSUSE 11.0, it’s exactly the same thing. I download the latest version, install it in the proper directories for browser plugins, and remove all traces of the 32-bit adaptations. Opera 64-bit runs it just fine. Firefox just closes up the space on the page where the Flash should be. This, even if I turn off Flashblocker.
I don’t pretend to know why it works that way. However, I do know I can’t get any information from the logs or even by running Firefox from the commandline. In other words, I can’t even report a bug.
