Fix Flash Player Conflict in Linux

If you have previously installed flash player 7 as a normal user and want to upgrade to flash player 9, and you've done it as root this time chances are your browser might still use the older version. This is what happened when I upgraded to flash player 9 for linux, and I installed it as a root user to the Firefox installation directory.

Upon installation it asks for the installation directory of firefox and will require you to shutdown all the browsers before continuing the installation. After installing the flash player and started the firefox, I tested it by visiting a 2advanced because it has embedded flash version detection. The site requires at version 8 and I was wondering why it didn't detected that I have flash player 9 already. I bypassed the flash detection of the site so I can view their full-flash homepage. Right-clicking on it, showed me that I have flash player version 7. I repeated the installation but still no luck. Then I remember checking the version that is recognized by the browser by typing "about:plugins" on the address bar. There, I see two different versions of flash player. I have both flash player 7 and flash player 9 on linux.

I visited mozilla docs on installing flash player, where I saw that installation of flash player 7 extracts two files: libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt. I checked the timestamp of libflashplayer.so on my firefox installation directory to make sure that my installation of flash player 9 has overwritten that file. However, I cannot find any flashplayer.xpt in that directory, so I tried to look for it in my home directory. I found a mozilla directory and looking deeper, I found old libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt files in the plugins directory.

I deleted those files not knowing how it may affect the browser. So I started checking the installed plugins again via "about:plugins" and don't see any flash player 7 plugins anymore, just flash player 9. I revisited 2advanced and my browser automatically bypassed their flash version detection. Right-clicked on the flash movie, and it is indeed showing flash player 9 now.

Download Flash Player 9 for Linux