• From: Melbourne
  • Registered: 2009-03-26
  • Posts: 86

Topic: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

Hi

When I am on Facebook and someone tries talking to me through the chat popup, Firefox drops a bar down saying that 'additional plugins are required to display this media'

The chat still works fine, and I just click on the x and the message goes away, but everytime someone says something it comes back. I would just ignore it except that I'm using my eee 701 with a 7 inch screen and the warning message is about half an inch thick, it also slows down the browser if I just ignore it.

So does anybody know what plugin Firefox wants? When i click 'find missing plugins' it says there are none.  And I have the usual ones. I have no problems streaming music or videos or anything like that.
I had this same problem when I was running Firefox 3 on 8.10 as well.

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PoliticsOfStarving's Website

  • From: Lincoln, UK
  • Registered: 2008-11-20
  • Posts: 4,429

Re: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

I do not use Facebook very often, but I was intrigued by your post and so I logged in to take a closer look. I clicked on the little chat icon, displayed bottom right, and was presented with:

Facebook Chat Application wrote:

You're using an old web browser to browse Facebook. To use the full version of Chat from within a regular Facebook window, please upgrade your browser. Switch to Firefox

Strange, I am running Firefox 3.5.2!? Out of interest, what version of Firefox are you running?

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corenominal's Website

  • Registered: 2009-07-29
  • Posts: 23

Re: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

My facebook chat thingamajig works just fine with FF 3.0.13

  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
  • Posts: 8,647

Re: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

Send a message to the Facebook webmaster(s), its probably some code thats causing it.

Otherwise you can just disable the prompt. Go to about:config and change "plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin" to true.

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  • From: Melbourne
  • Registered: 2009-03-26
  • Posts: 86

Re: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

corenominal wrote:

I do not use Facebook very often, but I was intrigued by your post and so I logged in to take a closer look. I clicked on the little chat icon, displayed bottom right, and was presented with:

Facebook Chat Application wrote:

You're using an old web browser to browse Facebook. To use the full version of Chat from within a regular Facebook window, please upgrade your browser. Switch to Firefox

Strange, I am running Firefox 3.5.2!? Out of interest, what version of Firefox are you running?

Yah, I have the same thing. The Shiretoko branded Firefox 3.5 isn't recognised as an official Mozilla browser by Facebook or something like that. I installed an extension that changes the user agent to trick Facebook into thinking it's the Mozilla branded Firefox, I think it's called User Agent Switch.

anonymous wrote:

Otherwise you can just disable the prompt. Go to about:config and change "plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin" to true

I thought there was a way to make Firefox hide the message, I'll probably just do that. Thanks.

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PoliticsOfStarving's Website

  • Toolz
  • #! Die-hard
  • Offline
  • From: Asia
  • Registered: 2009-02-02
  • Posts: 937

Re: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

PoliticsOfStarving wrote:

Yah, I have the same thing. The Shiretoko branded Firefox 3.5 isn't recognised as an official Mozilla browser by Facebook or something like that. I installed an extension that changes the user agent to trick Facebook into thinking it's the Mozilla branded Firefox, I think it's called User Agent Switch.

User Agent Switcher

I used to use that but it gets reset on every startup and that negates its functionality for a lot of usages.

These days I prefer to set general.useragent.override in about:config.

Never used Facebook...

  • Toolz
  • #! Die-hard
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  • From: Asia
  • Registered: 2009-02-02
  • Posts: 937

Re: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

Oh and there are plugins for Empathy and Pidgin. The former seems fiddly but the latter looks like a goer:
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/
Edit: It's in the repos. There's also a Prism app there.

Last edited by Toolz (2009-08-22 06:24:17)

  • From: Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
  • Registered: 2009-06-04
  • Posts: 21

Re: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

I think if you change the setting for general.useragent.extra.firefox in about:config then it will work. It's a persistent way to change your useragent setting in Firefox. I did that to remedy the Shiretoko/Facebook problem. It worked for me.

  • From: Lincoln, UK
  • Registered: 2008-11-20
  • Posts: 4,429

Re: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

RubiksQubed wrote:

I think if you change the setting for general.useragent.extra.firefox in about:config then it will work. It's a persistent way to change your useragent setting in Firefox. I did that to remedy the Shiretoko/Facebook problem. It worked for me.

I can confirm this fixes it on my system, I changed the value for the preference 'general.useragent.extra.firefox' to "Firefox 3.5". Thank you. smile

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corenominal's Website

  • Toolz
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  • From: Asia
  • Registered: 2009-02-02
  • Posts: 937

Re: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

I like the general.useragent.extra.firefox option too. The general.useragent.override option has the disadvantage that it sticks forever, even as you upgrade the browser - so for example the 'Gecko/20090803' would never change. I'm using Mint now so I also got rid of the general.useragent.vendor and general.useragent.vendorComment values.

Going back to general.useragent.extra.firefox - anybody have any idea what happens when we upgrade to Firefox (Shiretoko) 3.5.3?

  • Registered: 2009-06-05
  • Posts: 21

Re: Facebook Chat Plugin Required

Maybe a partial answer? : I just posted about a similar issue - every time I used FaceBook chat after I installed gxine multiple instances of gxine would open as I chatted.  Uninstalling gxine got rid of the multiple gxines (obviously) but caused FaceBook to indicate that a required plug-in was not available.  Apparently Facebook chat (on #! 8.04, anyway) looks for gxine.  After uninstalling gxine chat still worked fine, except for complaining about the missing plug-in.

-tip184