1135714 - Impossible to activate Flash on Facebook

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Peter Bengtsson [:peterbe]]

Attachment: Screenshot 2015-02-23 09.05.30.png

I have Shockwave Flash 16.0.0.305 set to "Ask to Activate". 

I visit Facebook and try to watch a video. See attachment. 

Clicking that "Activate Adobe Flash" does nothing. The usual chrome pop-up you get in the upper left-hand corner (the one with "Allow" or "Allow and Remember") does not show up. 

Even right-clicking and selecting "Activate this plugin" does nothing.

Considering that we advice people to set Flash in "Ask to Activate" and that Facebook is a kinda popular I think should be high priority.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Which channel are you on?

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I see this too.  I found that clicking on the date in the post to go directly to the post's standalone page allows me to activate flash on that page, but I can't do it from the timeline at all.  I'm on Dev Edition (currently 37) on OS X.

Comment 3

[Peter Bengtsson [:peterbe]]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #1)
> Which channel are you on?

DevEdition. 37.0a2 (2015-02-23)

Comment 4

[Stephanie Hobson [:shobson]]

I'm seeing this in Beta 36.0

Comment 5

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Is this a Firefox regression or a change to Facebook's video player?

Comment 6

[Wichai Termwuttipreecha: Chengings]

I've got this issue too.

Application Basics
------------------

Name: Firefox
Version: 36.0
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0
Multiprocess Windows: 0/2

Comment 7

[Alice Wyman]

A similar issue was reported today on mozillaZine's forum, for Flash videos on Facebook and YouTube (workaround is to reload the page):
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2922755 
Reload page to view Flash videos

Comment 8

[Peter Bengtsson [:peterbe]]

This is still a bug. Even right-clicking and selecting "Activate this plugin" does nothing. 

It's not a problem when the Flash player is in a modal window. After having clicked the modal window if you refresh you're taken to the video's permalink page. E.g. https://www.facebook.com/BreakingNewsFF/videos/vb.205440396170746/838828822831897/?type=2&theater

Comment 9

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

I cannot reproduce this on Nightly with multi-process disabled. I suspect this is related to bug 1173215, which was recently fixed.

Can anybody reproduce this on Nightly with multi-process support disabled?[1]

[1]: To disable multi-process, go to about:preferences, choose the General tab on the left, and uncheck "Enable multi-process Nightly" or "Enable multi-process Firefox Developer Edition", whichever it happens to be.

Comment 10

[Peter Bengtsson [:peterbe]]

Attachment: Archive.zip

Attached are 3 screenshots. 
In Nightly with e10s OFF.

Clearly I haven't flash fully activated (see top bar). 
The video don't load and just becomes grey. But when I right-click and select "Activate this plugin" it shows the "Allow?" dialog in the upper left-hand corner. 

Lastly, I allow and then I'm able to watch the video.

Comment 11

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

(In reply to Peter Bengtsson [:peterbe] from comment #10)
> Created attachment 8623187 [details]
> Archive.zip
> 
> Attached are 3 screenshots. 
> In Nightly with e10s OFF.
> 
> Clearly I haven't flash fully activated (see top bar). 
> The video don't load and just becomes grey. But when I right-click and
> select "Activate this plugin" it shows the "Allow?" dialog in the upper
> left-hand corner. 
> 
> Lastly, I allow and then I'm able to watch the video.

Thanks peterbe - so that sounds like on Nightly this is working as expected. I'm growing pretty convinced that bug 1173215 fixed this for the single-process case.

Comment 12

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

FWIW, I don't think the test case/original pain point on this bug is valid anymore, it looks to me like Facebook finally went all HTML5.  I haven't run into this in a long time, and there's no notification in the bar that flash is active when playing a video anymore.

Comment 13

[Peter Bengtsson [:peterbe]]

Yeah, Facebook has changed too much in 2 years to make this worthwhile to try to reproduce.