Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Installing multiple versions of flash in different firefox profile

I use the same laptop for flex development at office and general browsing at home. Flex developement required me to use Flash Debug version which was extremely irritating to use for general browsing because of Flash error popups on most flash sites.
Solution - Install different flash player for two different firefox profiles and make sure that Flex Builder uses the development profile.
Here's step by step how to do it
  1. Launch firefox profilemanger using
    [Path to firefox]\firefox.exe -profilemanager -no-remote
  2. Create a new Profile suppose home
  3. Now install first flash version(Retail 10.1 suppose) normally by downloading the installer from adobe site. Note that this won't be your default flash version, you install the one you want to be default second.
  4. Now copy the files NPSWF32.dll and flashplayer.xpt from %SYSTEMROOT%\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash folder to plugins folder inside your newly created Firefox profile. If plugins folder doesn't exist create one. Note that the profile folder would be default created at %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\bla-bla-[new profile name] folder e.g.
    C:\Users\arvind\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\nvr0p8s3.Development\Plugins
  5. Next install the default flash version normally(Debug 10.1 suppose)

    After this you should have two firefox profiles one using retail 10.1 Flash and other debug 10.1 flash, but you still need some way to launch two instances of firefox using different profiles
  6. For this we create a shortcut to firefox with following parameters
    -P home -no-remote where home is the new Profile you created in step 2
Now i just use this new shortcup for general browsing and configured flash builder to use default firefox profile for debugging.

Hope it helps

3 comments:

Arvind said...

You may use the extension at http://www.sephiroth.it/weblog/archives/2006/10/flash_switcher_for_firefox.php for a easier solution but the extension doesn't support the latest version of firefox yet

Arvind said...

For a mac version of this tutorial refer http://blog.rollingcode.org/2009/04/18/install-multiple-versions-of-flash-plugin-for-firefox/

eeks! said...

i understand