Flash Player and Safari aren't playing together?

July 31, 2008 4:23 PM

Flash Player 9 doesn't work in Safari, but does work on Firefox on an Intel Mac. Help!

This is Safari 3.1.4 and Firefox 3.0.1 on a MacBook running 10.4.11. With Safari, when I load any YouTube video, nothing happens-there's just a blank spot on the page where the video should be. It wasn't too long ago that Flash content was working in Safari, but I can't say with much precision since my girlfriend mainly uses this computer. With Firefox, Flash content seems to work perfectly. A combination of common sense, Adobe support forums, and Google has led me to try already, in every permutation and order:

-Deleting and reinstalling Safari
-Reinstallng Flash 9
-Uninstalling Flash 9 via the Adobe supplied uninstaller
-Repairing the disk permissions with Disk Utility

I'm out of ideas. Can anyone help?

posted by Kwine to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Is there anything in /Library/InputManagers/ ? Move anything you find in there out. Often unsupported Safari "extensions" -- and if it extends a piece of software not intended to be extended it's unsupported by definition -- get put there, and often start breaking things when the OS or Safari gets an update. There are a couple of Safari ad-blockers notorious for this.
posted by majick at 5:03 PM on July 31, 2008

Failing that, have you tried installing Flash 10 instead of 9? It's a beta, which might not be a good thing for you, but it's also more recent, so that might be!
posted by majick at 5:04 PM on July 31, 2008

Those are good ideas, majick, but there's unfortunately nothing in the InputManagers (actually, there's no InputManagers folder at all, which I take to mean that there aren't any). And as far as less than ideal solutions go, I think "Use Firefox for Flash" instead of "Mess around with a beta" might be better for us if it came to that.
posted by Kwine at 7:36 PM on July 31, 2008

This may sound insultingly obvious, but have you checked that plugins are enabled under Preferences/Security?
posted by malevolent at 12:15 AM on August 1, 2008

Hey, that does it! I didn't think to check Preferences, which is wildly dumb. Thanks malevolent!
posted by Kwine at 6:02 AM on August 1, 2008