Flash on Firefox 3 Beta 5

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is the latest and the greatest version of Firefox. It has many improvements over Firefox 2.
Despite being in Beta, Firefox 3 is so stable now that the most popular Linux distribution Ubuntu is shipping with Firefox 3 Beta pre-installed.
OK enough praising Firefox 3 Beta, lets come to the most common problem one might face when we install Firefox 3 Beta.


I tried Firefox 3 Beta on Windows XP Professional and discovered that I cannot install Adobe Flash on it. whenever I tried I get some weird error saying

"Firefox could not install this item because
"install-3lw..rdf" (provided by the item) is not well-formed or does not
exist. Please contact the author about this problem."


I wanted to make Firefox 3 Beta my primary browser, but without Flash -- its a big NO. What I did is a hack, but hey it works for me. Luckily I still have Firefox 2 installed on my system. I have it installed at
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox".
I went to the plugins directory

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins".

and copied these four files

1. flashplayer.xpt
2. npnul32.dll
3. NPSWF32.dll
4. NPSWF32_FlashUtil

Then I copied these files to the directory where Firefox 3 Beta 5 is installed

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5\plugins".

While copying I got a warning saying that npnul32.dll is already present in Firefox 3 Beta 5 plugins directory, so I did not copy it. That's it.
These four ( actually three) files ensured that I have Flash working in Firefox 3 Beta 5.

I am sure that similar hacks exist for Linux too, will try tonight at home.

Happy Flashing with Firefox.