FireFox, AdBlock, FlexBuilder debugging. Not a healthy combo.

After about a day of tearing my hair out, making new workspaces, reimporting projects, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, restarting, installing updates, re-installing Flash Player, messing with my mm.cfg file, seriously considering reinstalling Flex Builder…

all in the attempt to get Flex Builder’s tracing and debugging working again…

I finally did some searches and found that FireFox’s Adblock plugin can mess this up. I had installed and activated the plugin the other day in order to test a bug someone had reported in Gravity Pods. I had even disabled the plugin after I verified the bug, but didn’t uninstall it. Sure enough, uninstalling it did the trick.

The symptoms were no tracing or debugging. Sometimes. In some projects. That was the killer part. It would work for a while, work all the time in some projects, then suddenly stop. The console would open up and immediately terminate, completely empty.

Anyway, I’m happy to have fixed it and maybe will save someone else a few hours and frustration.

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12 Responses to FireFox, AdBlock, FlexBuilder debugging. Not a healthy combo.

  1. TK says:

    Hey! So cool! So THAT’S why I FlexBuilder always terminates the debug session in Firefox! Awesome! Thanks Keith!

  2. Steven says:

    good to know. last night i made the stupid mistake of naming one of my classes the same as one of my MXML files. took me a while to figure it out, but i was happy when i did. i’m a flex noob 🙂

  3. gropapa says:

    hi there! i had the same probleme with adobe multimedia player, it seems that the mm.cfg is locked so no trace can be written on it…

  4. sascha/hdrs says:

    Another reason to run your stuff directly in the Standalone Flash Debug Player rather than in the Browser. That’s what I’m doing all the time anyway.

  5. John says:

    I ran into another problem using AdBlock. I was loading dynamic files from a clients server. Their assets were in a directory named something like “promo” or something like that. AdBlock had a wild card block on directories with that name. Similar end result — lots of hair pulling and loss time.

  6. Joel says:

    I’ve had problems with Adblock across the board. For some swfs it blocks them entirely. Adblock plus is a little better, but freezes on ‘loading assets’ on a number of swfs. The non-Plus adblock is extremely dated and no longer updated.

  7. T says:

    thanks for the heads up, Im positive ill be running into this eventually, as I use adblock on all my machines.

  8. Marty Pitt says:

    Out of interest, was this on Mac or PC?

  9. I just had to solve a similar “bug” at work this week!

    My Flex app which was embedded using the latest SWFObject just wouldn’t load on a client’s Firefox 3, and the alternate DIV content wasn’t displaying either.

    It turned out that Adblock was blocking it, and that the issue is documented by both Adblock and SWFObject.

    “Flash videos won’t load with Adblock installed in Fx3”:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10

    “In Firefox 3 Adblock incorrectly blocks Flash content, even if your entire page is whitelisted. In this case just disable Flash block (by disabling the extension, don’t use Adblock’s disable feature, because then it still won’t show Flash content).”:
    http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/wiki/faq#14._Why_can%27t_I_see_Flash_content_in_Firefox_3?

  10. Amarghosh says:

    Its not just about AdBlock, even the Google toolbar extension for Firefox can cause it. My flex debugging profile of Firefox doesn’t have AdBlock and Google toolbar.

  11. Joeflash says:

    There’s a bug in Firefox 3 that’s been there since it was released over seven months ago, that will disable Flash Player debugging with certain combination of plugins, not just Flash block:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438830
    http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-13064

    I personally have uninstalled FF3 and refuse to use it until Mozilla gets their shit together. Resolution says it’s fixed, and slated for release with FF 3.0.6, but we’ve heard this before… time will tell if the patch actually makes it out the gate this time.

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