The dark art of removing the Flash plugin from Firefox in Ubuntu Linux

...removing a plug-in you don't want by ... removing it?

There's no hope for mankind ;-/

Edit: ...but it's true that there could be a graphical way for removing plug-ins from Firefox, for those poor souls that accidentally clicked 'yes'.

On Debian I can simply add/remove plugins through the package manager.

Why remove Flash. Just use FlashBlock and the Flash Ads, and other flash movies, won't play unless you click on the flash logo in the centre of the flash area.

I use Adblock Plus and Flash Block, this stops almost all ads. For the odd site (actually I've only encountered one) where Flash Block doesn't work I use RIP (Remove It Permanently) to remove the Div or IFrame that contains the flash ad.

That's what got me in trouble with all the folks screaming about Dell's Ubuntu Flash ads - not having Flash. Not everyone uses that. ;-)

tracyanne, I use FlashBlock too. I think it is the greatest extension ever thought of. No more nags about "Do you want to install Flash?"

It is how Flash should have behaved to begin with: My choice to play or not.

The directions for removing flash manually are clearly described in the files that come with the download. The problem is he used the GUI to install it instead of downloading and installing it manually. That also means it was only installed for the user he was logged in as at the time.

Oh, for those who don't mind a little command line work: privoxy is a way better ad-blocker than I had ever expected. It stops ads before the browser "sees" them, and lets you get to them from the browser easily if you want to.

Its accuracy rate is way beyond what I expected.

In Xubunu 7.04, I was able to click on the window where the Flash animation was going to run ... and it was that easy. But nowhere was there information on how to remove the Flash plugin.

However, I just tried to add Flash to my Ubuntu 6.06 LTS box, and I did it the "traditional" way, by looking through the plugins at Mozilla.org. By following the instructions, I found that the readme.txt gave the same instructions for removal that I found from Adobe. So when installing the plugin that way, removal procedures were clear.

But ... while I did install the plugin in Ubuntu 6.06, it didn't work. Don't know if it's a bug in 6.06 LTS ... but everything looks right yet functions not.

> while I did install the plugin in Ubuntu 6.06, it didn't work.

Did you put the files in the plugin directory of your firefox profile or in the /usr/lib/firefox/plugins directory? Did you verify that the permissions were set properly? The installer should do all of that for you, but who knows. On my Slackware system here at work, the libflashplayer.so file is owned by root and is set to 755. Flashplayer.xpt is owned by root and is set to 444. This is in the /usr/lib/firefox/plugins directory, so it works system wide. In your personal profile, they should probably be owned by you with the same permissions.

However, I have a virtual machine with Ubuntu 6.06 available here, and you're correct. When installed as a user, it doesn't work. It does seem to work if installed in the global directory though. Hmm, more testing required...

Yep, further testing reveals that a manual install to the /usr/lib/firefox/plugins directory works with no problems, but installing to ~/.mozilla/firefox/whatever.default/plugins doesn't work. I have no idea why, as it works fine both ways on my Slackware systems. However, I noticed that there was no plugins directory in my firefox profile, which suggests that whatever's wrong is deliberate.