Ubuntu – Can I use the same built in flash library from Chrome in Firefox

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Chrome comes with flash support by default, Firefox does not. If I use both on my system is there a way to use the library responsible displaying flash content in Chrome to do the same in Firefox?

Best Answer

Edit: Flash is only distributed with the i386 builds of Flash. The rest of the answer is based on that (I'm using 64bit)

On a 32bit computer, the Chrome version of flash will be at /opt/google/chrome/libflashplayergc.so. If you have this, you could try copying/symlinking this around, it should still be using NPAPI so should be compatible with Firefox.

If that file doesn't exist, you're probably like me and don't have it.


I have Chrome installed and it claims (in about:plugins, click the "details" link) that it's using /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so plugin. This is the same one that Firefox is using.

You can also run locate libflash to have a quick look over the system for versions of Flash. /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so is the only version I have on the computer (the others are symlinks).

You should note that later this year (assuming their plans turn out) Chrome/Chromium will switch to a PPAPI version of Flash (from the NPAPI one it shares with Firefox). So whatever instructions you do get, they'll stop working at some point this year... Unless Mozilla backtracks and decides to support PPAPI (which is also possible).

I have had a look at the google-chrome-stable, -beta and -unstable packages and none of them have a Flash plugin in them.