vertical bars over images in firefox

[Mike Wright]

Mark Haney wrote:
> Mike Wright wrote:
> 
>>Hi all,
>>
>>When using firefox since fc6 (I skipped fc5) I've noticed that many
>>images, suchas .swf, now display as a large pair of vertical bars,
>>somewhat simalar to the insignia worn by U.S. Army captains, that may
>>appear alone or on top of some other background.
>>
>>On really lousy sites where it's flash or nothing or where most of the
>>adverts are flash this is (IMO) just plain ugly and really annoying.
>>It's as if someone is threating "Use flash or else we'll destroy your
>>user experience".  If that's the case how about a little CSS ala "body
>>{display: none;}" and we wouldn't have to waste our time on sites like
>>that.  <-- me being facetious ;)   Whatever happened to "failing
>>gracefully", the mantra of web designers?
>>
>>Does anybody know where these abuses have come from?  Are they from the
>>Mozilla project or is this something peculiar to fedora's spin of
>>firefox or perhaps something peculiar to fedora itself?
>>
>>Regardless of its origin I would like to stop it.  Anybody know how to
>>change this behavior?
>>
>>Forever indebted to whomever has a solution,
>>Mike Wright
>>
> 
> 
> If I get what you are saying, I see similar things, mostly over 'title
> bars' I suppose is the best way to describe it (article headers on
> Slashdot for instance).  Generally, these go away if I scroll the bars
> off the screen and then back down where I can see them.  Is this similar
> to your issue?
> 
> I don't know of a way to fix it other than the aforementioned scrolling,
> but for flash objects in Firefox, flashbblock is the extension I never
> go without.  That and AdBlockPlus make life much easier for me on that
> front.
> 
> HTH.
> 

Thanks for the response, Mark.

The scrolling method didn't work for me.

Turns out it is a plugin called libswfdecmozilla.so, an adobe flash 
player, that apparently doesn't work correctly for me.  Just as well 
because I despise flash (it's right up there with bling).

It is not mentioned on the firefox plugins sites and those sites only 
explain how to install plugins, not remove them.  From firefox's 
location bar about:plugins shows it as the first plugin and enabled but 
I can't figure out how to disable it short of removing it from the 
plugins directory.  The firefox help menu explains how to use the 
edit->preferences section but I can't seem to locate any reference to 
the nifty commands suchas about: etc.  I know there is another one that 
allows displaying/changing other settings, but I can neither figure out 
the magic incantation nor how/where to find it.

Anyway, once the plugin was removed from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins the 
pages appear (so far) to display correctly.

Mmmmm, much better now...
:m)