For a long while going back to Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10, and even the latest 10.4 lucid, there has been a nagging issue with the Adobe Flash player being unresponsive to mouse clicks. This bug stops you from interacting with Flash buttons or controls for example those in video players or games which is obviously very frustrating. Being such a high profile issue which affects many users it’s amazing that it has taken this long come up with a fix.
Here is the official bug on launchpad which concerns the flashplugin-nonfree package and mentions a couple workarounds.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/410407
So here is the bug and workarounds.
For example on youtube, whilst it recognises my mouse moving over various buttons, actual mouse clicks are not recognised. I can navigate using ‘tab’ but this is very painful. I can also right click. The problem doesn’t occur with other flash players, e.g. swfdec-mozilla.
WORKAROUND 1: Disable compiz
WORKAROUND 2: Remove flashplugin-nonfree / flashplugin-installer and install from adobe
WORKAROUND 3: Open a terminal and enter:
gksudo gedit /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer
Then add: export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 before the last line of text
Note: Chrome & Chromium are now working fine without workaround
These workaround’s have been verified to work for some users. We don’t need verification of whether or not they work for you.
To my knowledge it is still unclear what the underlying cause of this issue really is. But these workarounds are your best shot at resolving the issue until an official fix is released. The last workaround is the easiest and has the least impact on your system so I would give that a try first, it worked for myself.