[hardy] not prompted to install flash plugin

[Brian Murray]

Binary package hint: kdebase

hardy heron - 8.04

konqueror version 3.5.9-0ubuntu1

After a fresh install of Kubuntu from the i386 DVD image from 20080318.1 I launched konqueror and went to www.youtube.com and www.ubuntuvideo.com. At neither web site was I prompted to install a flash plugin.

[Ralph Janke (txwikinger)]

I can confirm this behaviour on the released hardy

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Roderick is working on getting this in for Jaunty.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Ok, so it turns out that kdelibs has a built-in detection feature for flash that we would be extending with our patch to prompt for flash installation with our tools. This detection, however, tends to be broken unless a website explicitly tries to embed a Shockwave Flash object. Some sites like Youtube, however, check to see if flash installed first via javascript before deciding to embed the flash object. Since Youtube chooses not to try to embed the flash object KHTML never detects it, which is the bug.

This probably should get an upstream bug report.

[Jonathan Aquilina (eagles051387)]

Version: (using KDE 4.2.2)
OS: Linux
Installed from: I Don't Know

Binary package hint: kdebase

hardy heron - 8.04

konqueror version 3.5.9-0ubuntu1

After a fresh install of Kubuntu from the i386 DVD image from 20080318.1 I launched konqueror and went to www.youtube.com and www.ubuntuvideo.com. At neither web site was I prompted to install a flash plugin.

the bug can be found at https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kde4libs/+bug/203967

[Zayed Amer Al-Saidi (zayed-alsaidi)]

I think this is fixed in revision 959136 by Maks Orlovich

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Tentatively fixed upstream for KDE 4.2.3. I'll test once that's out.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman-f)]

Unfortunately it does not seem to be fixed in trunk or KDE 4.2.3, where the fix was backported.

The problem here seems to be that youtube is doing its own checks for Flash, and won't embed the flash object unless Flash is found. The way flash detection currently works is that a "do you want to download flash" dialog is given if a page tries to embed flash when it is not installed.

[Dario Andres (andresbajotierra)]

What should we do about this ? As Jonathan described this seems to be out of scope.
Thanks

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman-f)]

Firefox manages to do it, so it's not exactly impossible. But I dunno how we'd go about detecting it better.

[Jonathan Aquilina (eagles051387)]

Would it help having the flash package pulled as a dependency of firefox?

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman-f)]

Distro Firefox packages don't do that either, since flash in nonfree software.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Not actually fixed upstream.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Our current flash prompt setup for 9.10 bypasses this bug now.

[Justin Zobel (justin-zobel)]

Thank you for the bug report.

As this report hasn't seen any changes in 10 years or more, we ask if you can please confirm that the issue still persists.

If this bug is no longer persisting or relevant please change the status to resolved.

[E-jjm (e-jjm)]

Flash and Netscape plugins are no longer supported.