Hi   !
Would you take a look at this:
www.thewindowsclub.com/flash-player-settings-windows
If this isn't helpful;   we'll have to keep looking   ......

If the player is not using the Flash Player Plugin then it may be a HTML5 Player.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/html5 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34399754

Happy112 --- I used that control panel to make all the most limiting settings, and then ... James --- I uninstalled flash and tried the page and it did not play the video that it previously played, nor did it in any way attempt to load it, it just said I need to install flash player. and then I reinstalled flash and then ... Happy112 --- I returned to the same page, and now it resumed the old behavior, excepting when it attempted to load the video after a delay, it eventually stopped saying I needed to enable flash in the browser.

Thanks to you both for your suggestions, which have led to flash not playing as I desired.

I conclude that it isn't an HTML5 player loading after flash, and that getting rid of stored data using the flash control panel removed something permitting this odd behavior.

However, the basic problem is not solved. Mozilla online docs say that flash should be listed on the "Page Info" dialog's Permissions tab, and it still is not. So I cannot adjust a page to remove permission to run flash once it has been added by clicking to enable flash in a video.

Any ideas why and how to fix this?

Correction, I found another bbc.com page that still loads flash without my permission! I checked again my plugin setting for flash, and it says "Ask to Activate". So nothing has been fixed.

In fact I disabled flash, and the video on that page still plays.

Further investigation revealed that new page is using an HTML5 player, so my above posts were premature --- apologies.

In any event flash is not showing when I right click on a page running flash, and go to Page Info and choose Permissions, although other plugins are shown there. This is so even for the following page, with flash running. https://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

How do I fix this?

Hi   again !
So far we've just been assuming that this a   'Flash-thing'; would you try this:   (just a stab in the dark,   but worth a try)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-common-audio-and-video-issues
Also see:
'Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL' :
        http://mzl.la/1xKsEca
In the mean time I'm going to ask somebody else to take a look at this.

carl37 said

In any event flash is not showing when I right click on a page running flash, and go to Page Info and choose Permissions, although other plugins are shown there.

This is a problem with Firefox 48-50 for VLC users. The VLC plugin now asserts that it can play Flash content, which has caused the permission settings for Flash to be listed under VLC instead of Adobe's plugin. It is scheduled to be sorted out in Firefox 51.

Until then, to see the true state of any permanent site exception for Adobe Flash I think you would need to disable VLC (set VLC to "Never Activate") and exit/restart Firefox.

Jscher2000 --- The VLC plugin is installed! So it may be the source of the problem.

I disabled it and restarted Firefox, and when I looked to see its status in the Add-ons Manager, it showed that not only was VLC disabled, but so was flash.

Further experimentation revealed that enabling or disabling either one had the same effect upon the other when Firefox was restarted. So I can have both or neither enabled.

(Also there's a checkbox to enable flash protected mode under the VLC options, that is similarly coupled to the same under flash options.)

So Firefox is muddling the two plugins together, and this is therefore probably the source of the issue.

I can wait for Firefox 51, but is there anything I can do in the meantime?

Thanks for testing. That's worse than I imagined, but since the "Always Activate" and "Ask to Activate" default permissions cross over between the two, having "Never Activate" cross over makes sense. I should have realized that. (Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any internal VLC settings to prevent it from listing Flash as one of its content types.)

In the meantime, continuing to have "Ask to Activate" for both is what I'm doing and what I would recommend.

With respect to items playing without site-specific permission, if the VLC line in the Permissions panel shows "Use default" then Firefox should do that, but glance at the address bar and see whether BBC has moved you to another site with a different permission when the content plays automatically.

You might also try out an extension that allows you to control which Flash players on a site run: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/click-to-play-per-element/ (I haven't tried it recently)