If you’ve installed the latest version of Google Chrome, and you are having a problem debugging your Flash in it, there’s a reason. As you may have heard, Chrome now comes pre-installed with the Flash player. For good reasons, this is not the debug version of the player. All well and good, you go over to Adobe.com and re-install the debug player of your choice and debug your latest project… still no debugging. Hmm… If you’re like me, you “solve” this by switching to Firefox for debugging. I finally found out what’s happening though.
It seem’s the built-in Flash player in Chrome will get used by default, despite whatever other version you might have installed. It’s always going to go back to its own original version. To change this, type the following in the URL field:
about:plugins
This will give you a list of plugins. Somewhere in there, you’ll see “Shockwave Flash” with the version, location, etc. Underneath that is a “Disable” link. Go ahead and click it. You’re not disabling Flash all together, just the built-in version. Now, when you hit a SWF on a web page, it’ll go to the latest system-wide version you installed, i.e. the debug player probably.
Ahh, I did wonder about that — although not long enough to do anything further than setting my Eclipse browser to Safari instead….
Hmm interesting. I for long wondered if there is a quick and easy way to switch between Debug and simple versions of player as I found it necessary to test stuff in both, in debug to see info on errors and in release to see how it behaves, there were some cases when for some reason applications acted differently in depending on the versions of player…
Actually, that’s great news for a whole different reason!
Because so far on Mac, all browsers including the SWFViewer of Eclipse all use the same plugin.
Now I can have a browser with a fast non-debug player while still debugging in Eclipse (FDT).
When you are on the about:plugins screen, if you have already run the debugger installer two instances of Shockwave Flash will be listed. You just need to disable the one whose path is in a Google Chrome directory.
After checking about:plugins, I found that I have 7 “QuickTime Plug-in 7.6.6 – Version: 7.6.6 (1671)”s for some reason… all from a firefox directory.
Flash Player 10.1 uninstalls previous versions. Since Chrome has FP preinstalled (but not the debugger), devs shouldn’t disable it via about:plugins, right?
On “Chrome 6.0.472.0 dev” both versions of flash (internal and plugin) are going to be merged into a single entry on the plugins panel. There is no way to disable just one using the GUI.
To disable the internal player you should run Chrome with the command: –disable-internal-flash
Thanks for the info. Getting Chrome to use the debug player was really giving me fits!
Found trouble with this but in about:plugins you might have to click on the details button on the top right to reveal all the versions of Flash player you have installed. Disable the one in the Google Chrome directory and you should be rolling…
Thanks for this!
I’m just changing from Safari to Chrome and found this weird issue…
I did what @Jasper said and it worked.
Anyway, thanks for @Miller Medeiros too for the special tip.
It works.
Now i can see the traces from Flash Builder console panel when i debug with Google Chrome.
Windows 7, Chrome 9.0.597.98, Flash Player Debugger 10.2 r152