A long time coming Adobe have finally released a 64-bit version of their Flash Player and it's for Linux.

It's in Alpha but reports suggest it's actually quite stable, so good news all around for us with 64-bit Ibex machines ;-)

• Adobe Flash Player 10 - 64bit Linux

You'll need to uninstall you're current Flash Player via either...

sudo aptitude remove flashplugin-nonfree

Or going into your ~/.mozilla/plugins directory and removing the old version.

To install simply download the tar file relevant to your distro, extract the plugin and drop it into your Firefox Plugins directory ~/.mozilla/plugins

Restart Firefox and you should be good to go,

to access the Firefox Configuration area, type this into your address box and hit enter...

about:config

If you completely screw things up you can reset to the defaults by...

• Start Firefox in Safe Mode
• Check the Reset to Defaults box
• Click the Make Changes and Restart button

Rails Gems

• FiveRuns
• New Relic

Linux Tools

• DTrace (solaris)
• Httperf

Web Sites

• SitePerf.com

Apache

• JMeter

Firefox

• Yahoo YSlow

Internet Explorer

• Fiddler

IE6 is a pain, especially supporting it when you're trying to build something really wonderful with javascript. However when you're web metrics come back showing over 60% of your users use it you really have to go that extra yard to put a smile on their face, it's tough but it's worth it in the end.

Thankfully a good friend pointed me to a site called evolt.org providing standalone copies of IE6, should help.

There are alternatives, Microsoft provide Virtual PC images to help you support their latest browsers; they've got a lifespan of about 3 months per download so you've got to grab a new one every couple of months but good as an acid tester.

On the Linux front you should be able to use the standalone IE6 build from the link above with WINE, or IE4LINUX.

Beyond that there's IETester for Windows, good for Vista as it's hard to get IE6 on Microsoft's latest O/S (xp is easier).

There's also another browser built by the Japanese company fenrir called Sleipnir for Windows which allows you to run Firefox and Internet Explorer side-by-side, last time I tried it had some stability issues but it looks to be getting there with the 2.8.2 release.

Should help.

...by the way the engine used by IE is called Trident ;-)

Swiftfox is like Firefox, but hellishly optimized for your Linux build, you can get it from...

• Go here
• Then download the installer right for your build (if 64-bit, download Athlon 64)

Once downloaded, navigate to the download in Terminal and do,

sudo sh install-swiftfox.sh

Flash

Now to get Flash running first check the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory exists on your machine, if not create it...

mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins

Adobe only provide it as a 32-bit library but with the necessary dependency you can support it so run...

sudo aptitude install nspluginwrapper

Once you've got that you should be capable of handling the 32-bit Flash player,

...grab Flash from here

Download the .tar.gz version, extract it to your desktop, then move the libflashplayer.so into the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory,

sudo mv ~/Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux/libflashplayer.so  ~/.mozilla/plugins

And finally restart Swiftfox, navigate to a flash video here and enjoy faster browsing with Swiftfox + Flash!