The generic Seamonkey 64-bit download from Mozilla.org runs the new beta 64-bit Flashplayer from Adobe on CentOS.
So here we are, CentOS 5.2 for x86_64. I installed the latest beta release of Flashplayer for 64-bit Linux. By “install” I mean I unzipped and untarred the archive package and got a single file: libflashplayer.so. I moved it, according to instructions, into my $HOME/.mozilla/plugins/ folder. Firefox, which comes bundled with CentOS can find it, but won’t use it much. Once or twice it has run a Flash ad, but otherwise closes up the space where a Flash window should be on the page. At the same time, it works very nicely in Opera.
However, the main reason I’ve always loved Mozilla’s browsers is because they render webpages into plain text better than any other browser. It gets the embeded links, the text attributes, vertical space between paragraphs, and always neatly wraps things to 72 characters. For a researcher who keeps finding critical pages disappearing from the Net, this the best way to prevent losing referenced material. So I keep using Firefox. Also, it handles some JScript better than Opera.
Just for fun, I decided to see if I could get a Seamonkey package to work on my system. Perhaps it would make a good semi-graphical browser I could cripple for security reasons — turn off all plugins, graphics, and disable JScript most of the time. It turns out neither RH nor any of the clones for this version offer a Seamonkey package. I could build one, but I wondered if there might be a quicker path. So I downloaded the 64-bit contributed build for Linux from the Mozilla site. It was just a big gzipped tar archive, and when opened, it was a simple matter to move the resulting seamonkey folder in under /usr/local/ and link from there to my desktop. I also had a set of Seamonkey icons in PNG format.
After picking up a compat-libs package for it, I launched it. Then I played with it a few minutes, checking a news website just to see how it rendered. Lo and behold, Seamonkey displayed the Flash content when Firefox would not. Yes, that includes Youtube and sound. I have no idea what’s going on, but if all the other plugins work with Seamonkey, it will be Firefox I use as the crippled safety browser.
