Aral Balkan

I installed the latest version of Flex Builder 2.0.1 today and it completely messed up the Flash Player on my mac. I mean, no amount of uninstalling it or reinstalling the Flash Player would get it to work in any of my browsers.

So, faced with the choice of either porting everything to Silverlight or finding a solution, I decided on the latter.

Here's what worked for me, in case anyone else has similar issues. Don't blame me if this messes up your system, etc., etc., disclaimer, disclaimer.

I went into /Library/Internet Plugins and moved the flashplayer.xpt and Flash Player.plugin files to the trash. I also deleted the Macromedia folder (which has a Flash Player folder in it with only a version.txt file) in ~/Library/Internet Plugins.

I then re-ran the Flash Player installer (debug version) and it had a hissy fit (Creating file: 1008:5, -5000 Access Denied Error). Changing the permissions on the /Library/Internet Plugins folder to 775, as per the hint in this Technote and relaunching the Flash Player installer resulted in a successful install of the latest Flash Player. (Just remember to change the permissions back to 755 once you're done.)

Comments

• "porting everything to Silverlight?" OOOOOOO(*Q@&#@$*(&OOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

  by Savvas Malamas on 2007-04-17 09:10:48

• I think Silverlight would be a good option Aral. Move with the times d00d, Flash is *so* 2000.

  by Pete on 2007-04-17 10:30:13

• I had this problem when installing Apollo, something to do with the flash debugger. I had to wipe flash and all it's setting then start over by getting the player and installer, which isn't too easy to fine.... sigh

  by Rob on 2007-04-17 11:00:06

• I had the same problem today when updating the flashdebugger for firefox on windows, the problem was that the installer installed the NPSWF32.dll file in the wrong directory to fix this I just copyed and pasted the file into "Mozilla Firefox\plugins" and everything was running again :-) just strange

  by Morten Reinholdt on 2007-04-17 12:10:10

• WOW, who would have guessed fixing a Mac when it goes bad is so complicated. ;-). And about SilverLight, I tried their demos. Not impressive. Not impressive at all.

  by Kris on 2007-04-17 14:52:53

• Wow, sounds like this might have been one of the very rare occasions when running 'repair permissions' might have actually worked!

  by Geoff on 2007-04-17 15:49:14

• Aral, This is a known issue, and you have found the correct technote to resolve the issue. This stems from installing the browser as one user, and then installing the player as another user. I am the engineer responsible for these installers and I am personally working on a fix that should be available in the near future.

  by Michael Williams on 2007-04-17 18:20:10

• It isn't that fixing a Mac is so complicated. It is that sometimes the installers goof. I have had similar troubles with windows machines that took way longer to fix than what you had to go through. Glad to know there is a documented solution, and they (according to Mr. Williams here) are going to fix the installer. However, when I installed Flex 2.0 on my Mac, I had no such troubles. Porting everything to Silverlight? Pssh. I'll stick with Adobe thank you very much. Thanks for posting the solution in case someone else runs into this.

  by Greg Ferrell on 2007-04-22 18:52:27

• I guess sarcasm (porting to Silverlight) doesn't come across well always on the web :)

  by aral on 2007-04-23 11:58:43

• [...] It appears NPSWF32.dll was installed here C:WINDOWSsystem32MacromedFlash so I copied the .dll over to the correct Firefox plugins directory. - an easy fix in this case. I have also read about other problems with installation of the .dll on both Mac and Windows (see comments). [...]

  by nwebb.co.uk » Blog Archive » FlexBuilder, FireFox and NPSWF32.dll on 2007-05-28 07:52:17

• I am so glad you made the comment about Sliverlight being sarcastic! There is so much misinformation about Silverlight out there that it would be a bummer if people actually started thinking it was a viable alternative to flash. It doesn't come close (yet.) I am a Flash designer/developer and I develop in C# under ASP.NET and SharePoint 2007. I made the same mistake thinking that Silverlight was going to be a "flash-killer." All I can say is that Flash and Adobe should not loose any sleep over that issue. For those of you still wondering about this, try and build functionality inside Silver light to do something like marshal user information back and forth dynamically to and from a web server. You will soon learn that Silverlight is a fun presentation tool but once you get past the 3D XAML and eyecandy, there is not much substance.

  by McHoyt on 2007-06-08 14:15:23

• I just had this same problem with Flex Builder 3 Beta 2. No Flash content was able to be displayed in Firefox or Safari. Automatic re-installation of the plug-ins failed as did manual. So I just ran 'Repair Disk Permissions' and re-installed the plug-in, now everything works great.

  by rob on 2007-11-15 15:31:56