As much as I play the game, you’d think I’d have more posts about EverQuest II. Just never thought my exploits within the game were worth blogging about. However, I thought this tip would be helpful.

Update November 22, 2013: I updated the batch file code below to work with the latest version of Adobe Flash. Every version of flash now uses a unique DLL name of the same version so you have to modify the batch file each time. In my case I am using this in a Windows 7 Pro 64bit environment. You’ll need to run the batch file as an administrator for it to be able to rename the file. I still use this to disable the flash content from the in-game browser.

Update June 14, 2012: With the latest patch on June 13th, 2012, the in-game browser has changed rendering most, if not all, of this information irrelevant, out of date, and/or unnecessary LOL. There will probably be some issues with this new browser framework; however, that will be handled in another post if need be. So far it seems to render pages much better and does seem to handle Flash content. I’ll keep the existing information here though.

The problem is (was) that when using the game’s built-in browser (which is more or less Mozilla Firefox 1.X) it chokes on websites that have Flash (usually ads) in them, such as the popular ZAM EverQuest II site. The newer versions of Adobe Flash just do not play well with this browser causing it to lock up or just simply crash the game. After much discussion in the support forums, I think the following two workarounds are probably the best:

1. Batch File to Disable/Enable Flash

The first is a batch file that you run before starting the game to disable flash and then re-run to enable Flash when you are done playing. The credit for this goes to Tatwi in this post:

Of course, you have to remember to run the batch file every time before you start the game and after you stop playing because this affects all plug-in type browsers such as Firefox and Google’s Chrome. It will not affect Internet Explorer. If you’re not familiar with batch files, Batch File Help is pretty good at explaining what they are and how to create them.

2. Add user.js file to game’s mozilla folder

This is probably the best work-around and is the one I use as it disables the plug-ins that are most likely to cause problems from loading in the in-game browser. You’ll want to add the user.js file to the mozilla folder in the game’s installation directory. Credit goes to Jrral in this post.

Since this appears to be a file that is not part of the game’s installation and is, therefore, not checked during the patching process, you don’t have to worry about it being replaced. I have not had the in-game browser cause a crash since making this change.

For your convenience, you can download both files in this ZIP file: eq2-userjs-flashbatch.zip. Hope this helps! 🙂

Update March 8th, 2012: It figures that not long after I write this post, they fix the problem according this March 6th Update. It looks like the \mozilla\greprefs\all.js file was updated with the following change:

If you’ll notice, this is the same as the second line in the user.js shown above. Even though they did correct the issue as it relates to Flash, I will still use the user.js file so it doesn’t load the other plug-ins as well.