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C
cb09876
Participating Frequently
March 6, 2016
Question

help - unresponsive plug in window in firefox browser, none of the obvious or usual 'fixes' work

  • March 6, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 4174 views

all of a sudden (gotta love that for a start) i get the pop up window:  unresponsive plug in,shockwave flash may be busy or stopped responding.  thanks for that newsflash, os = win 7, no recent changes or updates, browser is firefox, it is up to date, shockwave flash plug in is up to date.  i cannot 'test' it on the adobe pages because....i get the unresponsive plug in window.  i opened a chrome browser, it shows the plug in is current and...it operates properly in chrome, please don't tell me to switch to chrome, yes that is a workaround, i'd like to figure out what the problem is within firefox and get that fixed. 

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1 reply

jeromiec83223024
jeromiec83223024
Inspiring
March 7, 2016

If you haven't rebooted since you started experiencing the issue, I'd do that first.

If you're on a 64-bit version of Windows, it's worth your time to upgrade to 64-bit Firefox.  The new 64-bit firefox provides a native sandbox for NPAPI plug-ins, which replaces the bolt-on sandbox for Flash Player that we built a few years back.  The NPAPI sandbox gives you equivalent protections from malware, but without the inefficiencies inherent in bolting a sandbox on to the wrong side of the browser's plug-in interface, and the ability to use the 64-bit address space makes the browsing experience much more resilient to malware, for boring technical reasons.

You can get the 64-bit variant of Firefox here:

Mozilla Firefox Web Browser — Download Firefox in your language — Mozilla

If you're still stuck after that, go to Firefox > Help > Restart with Add-Ons disabled, and see if that makes a difference.  If it does, it's related to a third-party plug-in that you have installed.  You'll have to experiment with enabling them individually until the problem comes back to figure out what the culprit is.  Ad-blockers, privacy plug-ins, off-brand anti-virus/defense packages are all frequent fliers.  If you type about:crashes in the address bar and see entries with corresponding timestamps (I'm not sure that you will), click on those to submit them to Mozilla and give me the resulting links.


Again, 64-bit Firefox is going to solve most of the long-running stability problems that stemmed from inherent architectural issues related to the lack of a native plug-in sandbox.  It's well worth the upgrade, and I'd recommend just starting there.

C
cb09876Author
Participating Frequently
March 7, 2016

i'm pretty sure i'm already using 64 bit firefox, it's current, version 44 and below this i pasted what's on the troubleshooting page, by user agent i 'think' that implies win 64, in addition, when i look at the programs (flash player)it shows it's flashplayer npapi which your note mentioned, so i would infer it's specifically for the 64 bit, and i know that when i download/update flashplayer, it reads this as a 64 bit system.

meantime, i'd already gone into the plugins to ensure that it was flashplayer that was the problem, while disab;ed there were no crashes but not much worked - because it lacked the plug in, no audio or video would play, but there were no pop up windows telling me flashplayer was unresponsive.

interestingly - i tried a system restore. for some reason it didn't work, i got the message to disable any anti virus that's running and try again, just because, i opened firefox and all the pages that wouldn't load and shot up the unresponsive plug in warning - they all worked properly, no nasty messages.

HOWEVER

i know the situation isn't completley resolved, i say this because when you go to bing.com there is always an image with interactive boxes, well, the bing page comes up, but there is nothing other than the bing logo and search box displayed,, so something remains amiss....any more ideas?

thanks for any and all help, if i knew what happened during the attempted sys restore to stop the plug in crashes i'd let you know but right now, i'm not all that certain it's truly 'fixed' and as i mentioned, things like the bing page that i KNOW should be displaying more, aren't.

Application Basics

jeromiec83223024
jeromiec83223024
Inspiring
March 8, 2016

Bing isn't using Flash on the front page AFAIK, so things are weird, but it's hard to say what they are.  Are you using third-party privacy or ad-blocking tools?

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