Flash crashes in Yahoo mail

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
May 31, 2016
3 replies
1820 views

My browser is Firefox/Mozilla. IE crashes my whole computer. My Shockwave plugin kept crashing. I updated that twice, once last week, once this week. Since those updates, Adobe Flash crashes in Yahoo Mail. I updated that yesterday and again today with the same result. I've sent numerous crash reports with no confirmation of either the information contained or acknowledgement of receipt. Any help is appreciated.

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A

Anonymous

I have a Samsung laptop, running Windows 8.1. As I indicated, my browser is Firefox. I downloaded the latest Flash, version 21.0.0.242. I followed the Mozilla instructions regarding Add Ons, which shows how to enable and disable Flash. I've also had issues with Shockwave, but not to this extremity. My computer, which is set up for automatic downloads, warned me of possible "harmful content" but I manually installed it anyway. I have Flash set up to ask each time before running. It no longer crashes Yahoo Mail, but I am not allowing it to run in that application.

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

I was actually curious about the specific version of Firefox. Definitely make sure that you have all the updates for Firefox and Windows applied. While things are generally loosely coordinated, there are interdependencies between the browser and operating systems, and the current shipping state of all the products is what we're focused on.

I'm a little concerned about the harmful content message, but I'm not totally clear on what the installation workflow was. It's unfortunately pretty common for bad guys to serve up fake Flash Player installations, usually from a pop-up notification on a website, which links off to some fake website that isn't ours. They're starting to look really authentic. It's one of the problems with ubiquitous distribution -- everyone uses Flash, so it's a great thing to target if you're a bad guy.

Frequently, they'll bundle a current version of Flash Player along with some malware. If you downloaded it directly from adobe.com, it's fine. If you clicked on a link on a website or something, you might want to go grab a current virus and malware scanner and make sure that everything looks cool.

We always recommend that people download Flash Player directly from Adobe, and this really holds true for all software. Either get it from the app store for your environment, or download it directly from the manufacturer's website. Don't click through on links, and in the case of Flash Player, just set it to update automatically, so that you're getting the latest security patches as quickly as possible. It's 2016, and the bad actors are fast and highly skilled. As operating system and browser defenses get better, it becomes easier to attack the human factors, like tricking people into downloading fake stuff, which is why we're seeing more focus there lately.

For Flash Player, the right link is:

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

The symptom of the whole computer rebooting is usually indicative of a driver problem. On Win8 and higher, the machine will reboot by default instead of showing the blue screen.

I'd recommend disabling hardware acceleration to see if that resolves the situation where the whole machine goes down.

There are generic instructions for disabling hardware acceleration in the video troubleshooting guide, here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/video-playback-issues.html

If you're still stuck, please follow the directions in the guide on providing the dxdiag report and additional information about what you tested and saw.

Here are some IE-specific instructions on disabling hardware acceleration for the entire browser:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2528233