This is mainly a note for myself in case I need to remember this if I upgrade Firefox at some point in the future…
I discovered this morning that I couldn’t play video on cnn.com from Firefox. It’s always been a bit flaky – it usually says it can’t tell if I have Windows Meda Player installed, but this morning it claimed that it could tell that I didn’t have it installed. A little googling turned up the explanation – cnn apparently uses something called ActiveX, a Microsoft technology that is supported in Internet Explorer but not Firefox 1.5, and I had upgraded to 1.5 just a few days ago. The solution, which I found here, was to install a Firefox ActiveX plugin, which I found here. However the plugin is specific to the Firefox version. So if I upgrade Firefox in the future, I may have to repeat this process.