Making flashblock work again; and why HTML5 video doesn't work in Firefox (Shallow Thoughts)

Making flashblock work again; and why HTML5 video doesn't work in Firefox

Back in December, I wrote about Problems with Firefox 35's new deprecation of flash, and a partial solution for Debian. That worked to install a newer version of the flash plug-in on my Debian Linux machine; but it didn't fix the problem that the flashblock program no longer works properly on Firefox 35, so that clicking on the flashblock button does nothing at all.

A friend suggested that I try Firefox's built-in flash blocking. Go to Tools->Add-ons and click on Plug-ins if that isn't the default tab. Under Shockwave flash, choose Ask to Activate.

Unfortunately, the result of that is a link to click, which pops up a dialog that requires clicking a button to dismiss it -- a pointless and annoying extra step. And there's no way to enable flash for just the current page; once you've enabled it for a domain (like youtube), any flash from that domain will auto-play for the remainder of the Firefox session. Not what I wanted.

So I looked into whether there was a way to re-enable flashblock. It turns out I'm not the only one to have noticed the problem with it: the FlashBlock reviews page is full of recent entries from people saying it no longer works. Alas, flashblock seems to be orphaned; there's no comment about any of this on the main flashblock page, and the links on that page for discussions or bug reports go to a nonexistent mailing list.

But fortunately there's a comment partway down the reviews page from user "c627627" giving a fix.

Edit your chrome/userContent.css in your Firefox profile. If you're not sure where your profile lives, Mozilla has a poorly written page on it here, Profiles - Where Firefox stores your bookmarks, passwords and other user data, or do a systemwide search for "prefs.js" or "search.json" or "cookies.sqlite" and it will probably lead you to your profile.

Inside yourprofile/chrome/userContent.css (create it if it doesn't already exist), add these lines:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("youtube.com"){
#theater-background { display:none !important;}}

Now restart Firefox, and flashblock should work again, at least on YouTube. Hurray!

Wait, flash? What about HTML5 on YouTube?

Yes, I read that too. All the tech press sites were reporting week before last that YouTube was now streaming HTML5 by default.

Alas, not with Firefox. It works with most other browsers, but Firefox's HTML5 video support is too broken. And I guess it's a measure of Firefox's increasing irrelevance that almost none of the reportage two weeks ago even bothered to try it on Firefox before reporting that it worked everywhere.

It turns out that using HTML5 video on YouTube depends on something called Media Source Extensions (MSE). You can check your MSE support by going to YouTube's HTML5 info page. In Firefox 35, it's off by default.

You can enable MSE in Firefox by flipping the media.mediasource preference, but that's not enough; YouTube also wants "MSE & H2.64". Apparently if you care enough, you can set a new preference to enable MSE & H2.64 support on YouTube even though it's not supported by Firefox and is considered too buggy to enable.

If you search the web, you'll find lots of people talking about how HTML5 with MSE is enabled by default for Firefox 32 on youtube. But here we are at Firefox 35 and it requires jumping through hoops. What gives?

Well, it looks like they enabled it briefly, discovered it was too buggy and turned it back off again. I found bug 1129039: Disable MSE for Firefox 36, which seems an odd title considering that it's off in Firefox 35, but there you go.

Here is the dependency tree for the MSE tracking bug, 778617. Its dependency graph is even scarier. After taking a look at that, I switched my media.mediasource preference back off again. With a dependency tree like that, and nothing anywhere summarizing the current state of affairs ... I think I can live with flash. Especially now that I know how to get flashblock working.