Upon conclusion of that article you will have a very basic installation of Chrome that will browse quite well and fast. The problem is, however, you won’t have flash working, nor will you know how to add themes to your installation. Although themes are not crucial to using Chrome, flash is. Without getting flash working, you won’t be able to do things like view youtube videos.

By the end of this article you will be running Google Chrome with flash support enabled and using the available themes.

Before you begin

The first housekeeping task you need to do is make sure you have flash working for Firefox. Most likely you already do. To figure this out open up Firefox and enter “about:plugins” (no quotes) in the address bar and hit enter. When this page appears you should see Shockwave Flash listed somewhere on the page. If you do, Flash is working fine and you are ready to go. If not you will need to get flash installed. If you are using Ubuntu 9.04 this is simple: Navigate Firefox to a page that requires Flash. When the toolbar popup appears informing you a missing plugin needs to be installed go ahead with that installation. Make sure, however, you install the “official” Flash plugin – not either of the open source versions. After this is installed restart Firefox and check the “about:plugins” page again. Is it there? Good. You’re ready to move on to Google Chrome.

The first step is to make sure you have the most recent build of Chrome. As of this writing the most recent built is 4.0.202.2. You can find that out by clicking on the Settings dropdown and selecting “About Google Chrome”. Once you know you have the latest build you are ready to go.

Adding Flash support

The first thing you need to do is locate the file libflashplayer.so. To do this issue the command:

locate libflashplayer.so

The results of that command should look similar to:

/usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib/iceape/plugins/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

The file you will want to work with is in:

/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/

But before you do anything you need to create a plugins directory for Chrome. To do this issue the command:

sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

Now you need to copy the libflashplayer.so file to the newly created plugins directory with the following command:

cp /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins/

The final step is to run Google Chrome with plugins enabled. To do that you start Google Chrome with the following command:

google-chrome –enable-plugins

Now if you enter “about:plugins” (no quotes) in the address bar of Google Chrome, you will see an entry for Shockwave Flash listed.

You might want to change all of your Google Chrome launchers to reflect this command change.

Themes

Themes are simple. All you have to do is navigate to the Google Themes Gallery, select the theme you like, and click the Apply Theme button underneath the theme. After the file has downloaded the theme will change automatically. The only issue I have found with Google Themes on Linux is the Transparent theme will not work properly.

Final thoughts

I will warn you that the Flash plugin will crash a lot. Fortunately, the way Chrome works is that Flash crashing will not bring the browser down.  But so far, Google Chrome has failed to disappoint on any level.

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Apple Mac and Unix systems are affected by the vulnerability as well but the exploit that is currently in the wild is only affecting Windows. Adobe suggests to enable UAC in Windows Vista (and Windows 7). Windows XP users should consider moving or deleting authplay.dll to protect their computer system from the threat against Adobe Reader and Acrobat “but users will experience a non-exploitable crash or error message when opening a PDF that contains SWF content”.

An alternative would be to uninstall Adobe Reader or Acrobat and install one of the available third party pdf readers like Foxit Reader or Sumatra.

Adobe does not offer any advise on the Flash Player vulnerability. The only viable option seems to be to disable or even uninstall Flash and wait for the patch which is expected to be released on July 30 and July 31.

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Adobe published a temporary workaround to protect the computer system against this form of attack that users should apply until the release of a patch that would fix the critical issue.

To apply the workaround users should visit the Flash Player’s Settings Manager by following the link. There they should click on the Always Deny button which would prevent any website from accessing the microphone and webcam settings.

The new setting has to be confirmed in the popup that appears automatically after clicking on the Always deny button. The patch is said to be available before the end of October.

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Go to Youtube, increase or decrease the volume of the videos and delete all cookies afterwards. You will notice that the volume level is still at the same level when you close your browser and open it again. This is done with so called Local Shared Objects, better known as Flash cookies. The main question is of course how a computer can be checked for Flash cookies and how it would be possible to delete those cookies again.

This is actually a very tricky thing. I was searching for a way to check them on my computer but could not find it. After reading some information on the Adobe Flash Player website I was able to realize that the only possibility to check them was to open a page on the Adobe site which would show them.

The so called Settings Manager can be accessed from the Adobe website but is running locally on your computer. The Website Storage Settings display all Flash cookies that are currently saved on your computer. You can delete flash cookies from individual sites or all at once. It is also possible to increase or decrease the Kilobyte size of all information that are stored on your computer.

Adobe does not have access to the settings that you see in the Settings Manager or to personal information on your computer.

No Flash Cookies will be saved if you go into Global Storage Settings and disable the option “Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer”.

47 websites did store Flash cookies on my computer and I decided to delete all of them and disable the feature to be on the safe site. Did you know about Flash cookies ? How many did you find on your pc ?

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