Google Chrome, Flash Debugger and Tracing in the browser
Yesterday I was trying to test a fullscreen button on a video player and realised that I couldn’t unless it was inside a browser window. Unfortunately this meant that I would have no way to view traced results, so I installed Vizzy, a browser app that allows you to view flash traces whilst viewing your flash in a browser.
I’ve known about Vizzy for a while, but I’ve previously had no real need for it and when I’ve tried to install it in the past it didn’t seem to work with Chrome (my current browser of choice) so it was uninstalled pretty quickly. But this time I had no choice but to get it working – and as it turns out, the solution was pretty simple…Step 1 – Install Flash Debug Player
First off you need to make sure that you have the flash debugger installed. You can download it here and you can test if it’s installed by clicking here. Don’t worry if you’re using Chrome and the test site is saying that you don’t have the debugger installed, if you view the link in any of your other browsers you will see it has worked.
NOTE: if you use FlashDevelop like myself then you’ve probably already got the debug player installed, but it won’t hurt to reinstall it anyway (and it will update you to the latest version).
Step 2 – Install Vizzy
You can download Vizzy here. To test, open a swf that you know contains traces in your browser and make sure Vizzy is open at the same time. Vizzy will act like your Flash IDE Output window. But again, don’t worry if you’re using Chrome and it’s not working at this point.
Step 3 – Disable Chrome’s pre-installed Flash player
Steps one and two should be enough for you to view flash tracing in most browsers – Firefox was working straight away for me. However if like me you want to use Chrome instead, you will need to disable Chrome’s internal pre-installed Flash Player. Don’t worry it’s very easy…
a) Open a new Chrome window (CTRL-N if you’re reading this in Chrome)
b) type
chrome://plugins
into the address bar.
c) You should see a list of plugins – Flash is most likely to be the one at the top. Click “Details” in the top right hand corner and you will notice that there are 2 versions of flash installed. One of these is the pre-installed Flash player and the other is the Flash Debug Player you installed earlier. Find the one that ends with gcswf32.dll (ie. Chrome’s version of the player) and click “Disable”.
That’s it, you’re done. Clicking here should now tell you that you have the Debug Player installed and Vizzy should now work for you.
Enjoy!
james says:
June 15th, 2011 at 11:49 pm
Thanks a lot for this, i’ve always wondered why Vizzy didn’t work in Chrome, but have never taken the time to find out, as i usually use firefox with the FlashBug plugin. However i need to debug a chrome related issue, so this is pretty handy.
One thing i noticed, In my version of Chrome (12.0.742.100), neither of the installed Flash players ended in gcswf32.dll in the details panel, but one of them did have this location: /blah/blah/blah/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player Plugin for Chrome.plugin, so i just disabled that one.
Do you find that the flash player runs quite badly in Chrome compared to Firefox?
The Hippy says:
August 26th, 2011 at 9:05 am
Hey. Thanks for taking the time to reply. In answer to your question, I find that flash player runs with Chrome like a dream – and I generally prefer the browser of the newer versions of Firefox (what have they done to that lovely browser!?). However, I have noticed the flash player completely crash out in Chrome on a number of occasions – but I’m still not sure if this is down to the instability of the player, the browser itself, or in fact a combination of the two.