Can't play .swf files in Firefox after upgrading Shockwave Flash Plugin...

Report · Oct 15, 2015

Against my better judgment rather then continuing to ignore the vulnerability messages from Firefox I decided to upgrade from Shockwave Flash 18.0 r0 to Shockwave Flash 19.0.0.207 I wish I never did. Before Flash played .swf files beautifully inside Firefox with no problems the only reason I upgraded when to get firefox to stop making confirm the plugin's use on EVERY SINGLE webpage. When updated to Flash 19 I reloaded firefox and was puzzle to see both versions listed. I went to play my .swf file but it kept asking me to select a program to run it.

When I went into options I saw two files for SWF one was SWF (application/octetstream) and the other was SWF (application/x-shockwave-flash) both were listed as Always Ask so I set SWF (application/x-shockwave-flash) to use the Shockwave plugin since it was listed in the drop down menu but when I went to set SWF (application/octetstream) to use the plugin as well there was no options for it and no way to set it as such. I shrugged my shoulders and went to play my .swf file and it again ran. But then I got worried why do I have two versions of the plugin installed?

So I decided to uninstall Flash 18 from control panel but there was no flash 18 listed so I went to about:plugins to find where it's .dll file was located and simply deleted it. When I launched firefox yet again and tried to run my .swf program it wouldn't open it would ask me to select a program to open it with. Realizing I screwed something up I uninstalled and reinstalled Flash 19 and tried to associate the plugin with SWF file I still cannot set the association.

So now I don't know how to proceed. Do I rollback to Flash 18? Do I try to reinstall Flash 19 again? Or is there a even newer version that fixes this problem?

Report · Oct 15, 2015

There's a couple things that might be happening.

After getting a ton of feedback about requiring people to exit Firefox as part of the installation, we changed the process to let you update with Firefox running; however, this leaves open the possibility that you have open tabs with the old plugin, and new tabs with new plugins.

You *really* want to exit Firefox completely and restart it after an update.

The other historic reason for double-plugins is that something either got corrupted in the Windows Registry, or in Firefox's internal registry. It's typically the Firefox config file that gets weird, but let's eliminate Flash from the equation first.

You can manually go in and blow away any remaining Flash artifacts by following this guide:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/928315

If you find that you can't delete one of these keys, it's because the registry entry is corrupted. Windows runs it's registry checker automatically, so you'll probably need to turn to a commercial third-party registry cleaner/repair tool if that's what you're running into.

Before you do that, you probably want to take the opportunity to make a good copy of backups, then do some basic disk maintenance.

Check your hard disk for errors - Windows 7:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2641432

If you've completed the "clean" uninstall, there's really nothing left on the machine that comes from Flash.

I'd just reboot at this point to allow the system to run the registry checker and clear out anything weird that might be in memory (this really eliminates a ton of potential things that could go wrong),

Then download and reinstall Flash from here:

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer

If you're still seeing erroneous entries in the Firefox plug-in list, it's time to either move to a clean Firefox profile, or just do a clean Firefox install. You can export all of your information and import it back to Firefox, but that's beyond the scope of what I'm going to write here.

Here are a couple options that you can check out:

Use the Profile Manager to create and remove Firefox profiles | Firefox Help

Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings | Firefox Help

Also, just as a piece of general advice, you should really just install the latest Flash Player and opt-in to Automatic Updates. We're constantly doing proactive security work, and running an old version increases your risk of malware infection. Automatic updates will ensure that you have the latest fixes as soon as they become available, which is particularly important when we're pushing fixes to problems that have been discovered in the wild. Oh, and if you've disabled Protected Mode, you should really turn that back on. It's important.

Report · Oct 16, 2015

Still can't play the .swf file in firefox. It cleared up the duplicate entry in the add-on list but I still can't play the file. In options>Applications I have two SWF associations the bottom one was re-assigned to shockwave when it was reinstalled but the top one, the buggy one it seems, wasn't associated and that seems to be the one the browser is using to open my file. Is there anyway I can go into the firefox files and manually set it to use shockwave?

Report · Oct 16, 2015

Nevermind I fixed it. I took a long shot and decided to delete mimetypes.rdf it got rid of the duplicate SWF mimetype and kept the one Shockwave uses. I reloaded firefox and boom we're cooking with plasma.