When Will Flash Player Stop Crashing?

Yeah, the most frequent crashes are related to graphics drivers and don't really have anything to do with Flash.  It's the graphics hardware subsystem blowing up underneath us.  (We could do everything in software and avoid the complexity of running across a huge fragmented market of hardware and drivers, but it comes at the very significant expense of performance and battery life).  The recommendations above are totally solid advice.

Also, if you're on a 64-bit version of Windows, you should upgrade to 64-bit Firefox.  You'll get a *much* better experience from Flash and Firefox in terms of stability, performance and security.  Mozilla doesn't offer it by default (yet), so you're almost certainly running the 32-bit browser.  Just grab the download from the 64-bit column.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/

If disabling hardware acceleration *doesn't* resolve your issue, please post a link to a crash report.  I'd be happy to take a look.  As I explained elsewhere today, "it crashed" is an outcome, not a diagnosis, much in the same with that "he's dead" isn't a diagnosis.  There are a million reasons for why the plug-in might crash.  Understanding the sequence of events that led up to the crash to understand where corrective action is needed is the important part (and getting that information is 95% of the challenge of fixing it).  Once we have a reproducible example, debugging and fixing a problem becomes a straightforward exercise.

There are also some boring architectural reasons for why Flash Player on 32-bit Firefox for Windows has some pathological problems (the load from Firefox and Flash communicating with each other overwhelms the operating system's ability to relay those messages reliably, even though they're supposed to be reliable), so my bet is that you're just getting the generic IPC (inter-process communication) hang with 32-bit FIrefox, and moving to 64-bit will eliminate that whole class of problems.

At that point, if you're still seeing crashes, please type the following in the address bar:

about:crashes

Then click a couple of the links to submit crash reports, and post links to the resulting pages here.  I'll be more than happy to take a look.

Thanks!

Hi Greg,

In Firefox, please try disabling hardware acceleration.

Instructions are included here:

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

If the problem is resolved then you need to update your graphics drivers.  If none are available (or updated drivers do not resolve the problem), you can leave hardware acceleration disabled until drivers become available that fix the problem.

If the issue persists, re-enable hardware acceleration (since that's not the problem) and I add a bug in the Adobe bug base with the crash logs. Provide a link to the Mozilla crash report for further analysis.

In the address bar, type:

about:plugins

You should see a list of crashes.  Click the first few to submit them to Mozilla, then paste the links to those pages in the bug. Refer the doc for the steps to capture crash logs and log a bug: Report a Flash Player crash or error

Regards,
Rave