Quick Firefox Workaround for YouTube’s Over-Sensitive Flash Detection

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got some mix of Firefox, the current version of Adobe Flash, and a bunch of extensions like AdBlock and NoScript which normally don’t cause problems… and then suddenly a YouTube video insists on giving you messages like “You need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this video.” and “Upgrade to Flash Player 10 for improved playback performance.”

If you’re thinking “Oh! I’ll use FlashVideoReplacer!”, no. I use that and it just gives me a black square in these circumstances, so here’s a trick that’s never failed me:

1. Install Greasemonkey
2. Install the YousableTubeFix userscript.
3. Install the InlineDisposition addon.

Now, whenever you want to view a video that’s acting up, just click the Download button that YousableTubeFix provides and choose your format of choice. InlineDisposition will then ensure that, for any format the browser can handle, it to opens in the browser rather than downloading. In this case, that’ll mean either Firefox’s built-in WebM support or a plugin like VLC‘s plugin or gecko-mediaplayer or the QuickTime plugin. (If you’ve only got the built-in WebM support, FLV and MP4 files will fall back to offering to download)

YousableTubeFix also provides a bunch of other nice features for customizing your YouTube experience when the Flash player isn’t acting up. (For example, killing auto-play and/or auto-buffer and automatically sizing the video player in ways that YouTube doesn’t offer even if you are logged in)

Enjoy.

Note: YousableTubeFix is available for Chrome but, since InlineDisposition isn’t, you get a download dialog, which makes it a lot less comfortable as a quick workaround.

Quick Firefox Workaround for YouTube’s Over-Sensitive Flash Detection by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.