Comment 17 for bug 554449

An addendum:

It appears that the plugin used for flash in Firefox is actually controlled by the 'mozilla-flashplugin' alternative, contrary to what I said above.
So - if you want to try out the native pre-release 64-bit plugin from Adobe in Firefox without first uninstalling any alternative Flash plugins, then you have to do this:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so mozilla-flashplugin /var/lib/flashplugin/libflashplayer.so 55

Before this will work you'll need to download the tarball from Adobe labs and unpack the libflashplayer.so file somewhere - I used /var/lib/flashplugin as it seemed sensible. If the file isn't there then the above command will complain.

The last argument, 55, makes this option a higher priority alternative so it should then be used automatically. You can do this to inspect or switch the setting:

sudo update-alternatives --config mozilla-flashplugin

So now my question to Ubuntu developers is: why is the flash plugin for Firefox controlled by the mozilla-flashplugin alternative and not the firefox-flashplugin alternative (or any of the other related alternatives)? Is this documented anywhere or is it just something that needs tidying up and fixing?

Cheers,

TIM