Firefox 3 gotcha: Installing Flash and Java

Unlike many people, my usage of Firefox 3 has been restricted to test and virtual machines. Thus, I may have stumbled across a bug that goes unnoticed on more actively used systems. There seems to be a problem installing the Flash and Java plugins, at least on Windows machines.

Firefox 3 obviously works fine with both Flash and Java, assuming they are already installed. But, if you try to view a web page that requires either plugin, clicking the "Install Missing Plugins" button (shown below) doesn't work, at least on four Windows machines that I tested.

On a Vista machine, Firefox never found the missing plugins, either Flash or Java. It just kept searching and searching. On Windows XP, both plugins were "not available" (see below). I tried this on XP Home and Professional and with both a normally installed copy of Firefox 3 and with the portable version. I even tried this on Windows 2000 and got the same results as with XP. None of these Windows machines had any anti-malware software installed.

It's not all bad news. Every time I manually installed the Flash and Java plugins things went fine.

To test this yourself with Java, you can use the version page at my JavaTester.org site. To test Flash, try the Adobe Flash tester page. You can double check that neither plugin is installed by entering "about:plugins" in the address bar, without the quotes.

A search of the Firefox tech support website and forum turned up nothing about this. Here's a search for "flash player" and one for "Java plugin".

I haven't tried this with other plugins and not being a Mac person, haven't tried it there either. But, I did try it under Ubuntu 8.04 where the auto-install of both plugins ran fine (but you may have to restart Firefox).

My best guess is that this is a Firefox bug. If you're running Firefox 3, and don't have one of these plugins already installed, please try it and let me know. You can email me at michaelhorowitz at gmail. Thanks.

NOTE: I posted this as a question in the Firefox Forum, but it went unanswered. The price we pay for free software is the lack of tech support. I will follow-up, as best I can on this, with Mozilla, Adobe and Sun. This is a Firefox 3 issue, I tested the auto-install of Flash on Windows XP with Firefox 2 and it worked fine.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

[sonofafur]

I have installed Firefox 3 since it came out and the plug-ins carried over from Firefox 2. Having used Firefox since the original public edition, I can say that the Plug-in installer has never worked recently, however simply visiting the sites (Shockwave / Flash / Java google searches to find their sites) has a working plug-in installer. This may be because either the sites haven't updated their flash player/etc link or this function never really worked anyway. I've gotten it to work once with flash back in the days of Firefox 1, but ended up manually installing anyway.

[mhinnewyork]

But, since auto-install worked for me under Ubuntu 8.04, any problem is probably with Firefox rather than with Adobe or Sun. Probably. Michael Horowitz

[computergeek1971]

I had the same problem with RC1 and RC2 on Windows XP SP3. I also had to manually download and install them.

[mhinnewyork]

Thanks for the info. I forgot to mention that the XP systems I used were at SP2, I haven't upgraded any of my machines to SP3. Michael Horowitz

[AySz88]

According to a few bugs filed in bugzilla, the Firefox people forced Java and Flash auto-installs to fail because the installer .xpi were buggy. See:
Flash: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433592 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416396
Java: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=419928#c35

[mhinnewyork]

Thanks for this, I'll follow-up on it. Michael Horowitz

[AySz88]

Oops, there seems to be a Firefox bug mucking things up in there too: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435788

[moopenguin32]

I just installed Firefox 3.0 on a Vista Home Premium laptop and encountered this very same thing with Flash. It did not hang when searching, but came up to the point where I had to click on the "Manual Install" button. I remember in past versions of Firefox where the plug-in would actually install. While this is not a major problem, having it install without going elsewhere is convenient.

[peterh_oz]

I had the same problem. Download the installer, and choose to "Run as Administrator". This FIXES the problem and flash is now installed correctly.

[waltgrieve]

I got Javascript on Firefox 3 working with the following simple steps,,,,
1. Tools-> Options-> Content
2. Enable Javascript and Enable Java were already checked so I unchecked Enable Java and clicked OK
3. Then again go into Tools-> Options-> Content and Check Enable Java and click OK

It seemed that toggling the option off then on again seemed to kick it into life!

[Frungi]

This problem very much irritates me, because I'm a college student. On the lab computers on campus, students obviously don't have access to administrator accounts, so it's impossible (please correct me if I'm wrong!) to install Flash for Firefox 3.