I'm quite annoyed with my firefox and Flash files :
When I try opening a .swf
file with it:
- If the file is on the web (via
http://...
), it plays normally in browser - If the file is local (via
file:///...
), firefox only show me a dialog to download it
It tried opening a web swf file, downloading it then opening it locally, it's the same. So I guess it's a firefox problem.
I'm on Gentoo Linux, and it started today, without any apparent reason.
Best Answer
After some digging into this myself, I've discovered it is a MIME type issue. Firefox (or Chrome) on Linux won't play SWF files if it thinks the type is application/vnd.adobe.flash.movie.
Per https://askubuntu.com/questions/478169/why-cant-firefox-run-local-swf-files:
Edit /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml as root and replace the following:
With:
And then run:
I found I needed to restart Firefox after. Here's a script very close to one from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2218732&page=2 that performs these steps (run it with sudo), but I will warn you -- I noticed that different installs seem to have different spacing, which can trip up the sed script, which is what happened to me.