Flash Player 15 crashes with ff33

Report · Nov 25, 2014

Hello forum,

Before posting this topic I have thoroughly googled for a possible solution to my problem and eventually found a temporary solution which is disabling protected mode.

When disabled there is no flash player crashing. I would like to know what might be a permanent solution for this.

I have Windows 8.1 64bit with updated ff 33.1.1 and updated flash player 15.0.0.233

Things i've tried so far which didn't worked out:

1. Starting ff in safe mode.

2. Resetting Firefox. (even with no add-on and plugins it crashed)

3. Fresh installation of Firefox. (no extensions what so ever)

4. Fresh installation of flash player.

5. Disabled OpenH264 (to check for a possible conflict)

Doing all this, flash player still crashed. Eventually i had to disable protected and it worked.

Another issue is that my Updates options is greyed out as well.

In my Control Panel it shows Flash PLayer (32-bit). Is there any 64-bit version as well?

Kindly help.

Thanks.

Report · Nov 25, 2014

One more thing to add, i've disable hardware acceleration as well but still...

Report · Nov 26, 2014

Anyone?

Please help.

Report · Nov 26, 2014

Protected Mode for Firefox is an important security mitigation designed to provide defense-in-depth protections against modern malware targeting Flash Player. To address the growing body of attacks against Firefox, we retrofit a sandboxing approach to Firefox's plugin architecture NPAPI, which originated in the 1990s.

There's a good explanation of what this looks like, here:

http://blogs.adobe.com/security/2012/06/inside-flash-player-protected-mode-for-firefox.html

Flash and Firefox use a communication channel provided by the operations system called IPC (Inter-Process Communication) to pass messages. In addition to the multiple layers of abstraction introduced by Protected Mode, there are two additional layers between Firefox and our broker. This means that each message passed between Flash and Firefox is passed through four different processes, and there are four times as many messages being passed.

What we observe when we look into the typical generic Flash/Firefox hang, is that a message is dropped or delivered out of order, and one of the parties just sits around waiting for a response that never comes. Eventually Firefox's 30 second hang detection kicks in, and it safely kills the Flash Player process, which then triggers the crashed plugin screen.

We've spent a lot of time playing with this, and what we generally find is that disabling any of the layers in this stack, Protected Mode, PlugIn Container, etc, causes an improvement in stability. Our working theory is that by reducing the number of messages that get passed, we don't see the problems with messages getting dropped. We're not maxing out the message-passing capacity, and things work as intended.

Competing browsers like Google Chrome and Internet Explorer have invested heavily in creating modern plug-in architectures that offer both security and efficiency advantages. Unfortunately, Mozilla envisions a future without plugins, and modernizing the plugin APIs to provide both security and efficiently is not a priority for Firefox.

The thing that muddies the issue here, is that you've also disabled hardware acceleration. If you want to isolate the problem, you'll need to change one variable at a time and figure out which one matters. If the crashes come back when you enable Hardware Acceleration, then we know that it's related to your GPU. It's typically stale graphics drivers, although on Win8, it's probably the opposite. Writing good GPU drivers is really hard, and it takes quite a while for all the little bugs to shake out, regardless of how much testing you do in the lab. The real world is a messy, funky place.

So, if it's hardware, see if there are available GPU drivers. If there are, update. If it doesn't solve the problem, disable hardware acceleration for a few months and repeat.

if it's not hardware related, then you'll probably be happier on a different browser. IE has been tuned heavily for Win8+, but some of the choices intended to make IE more compatible with the web break a lot of sites that were otherwise working fine. Google Chrome sports a modern plugin architecture, and hasn't made any major departures from behavior in previous versions, so will probably give the most secure and predictable experience in the short-term.

Report · Nov 26, 2014

Hello Jeromie,

I have re-enabled protected mode, turn on hardware acceleration and page crashed. Turned off hardware acceleration and its still crashing.

My GPU drivers are up to date. I have inbuilt Intel(R) HD Graphics Family and NVIDIA GeForce 830M both as my display adapter, could be one of the reasons? But when i bought this notebook pc (HP Pavalion) i didnt faced any issue while browsing. It is happening only from past couple of weeks.

Another thing i would like to point out is that, after closing the error window and ff, when i re-open ff and browse the same page it works well without any crash. So everytime i have to close the error and ff and re-open ff to get the page load normally without crashing. I have submitted couple of crash report to ff i hope the will look into it.

I have switched to opera for the time being. Kindly let me know if there is anything else i could possible do to resolve the issue.

Could you help with the greyed out update page of FP setting manager? I use to use it to manually check for update. It is greyed out now, even after a fresh install it remains greyed out.

Thank you for you assistance.

Report · Nov 26, 2014

The only reason that I can think of for greying out the UI is that you're running on an account without administrative privileges.

If you want to copy the links from those crash reports you submitted (you can get them from about:crashes in the firefox address bar), I'll take a look and see if there's anything useful.

FWIW, Opera Developer uses PPAPI. Regular Opera uses NPAPI, and without any of the sandboxing protections that we built for Firefox. If you have a choice, I'd go with Opera Developer, and download the Beta PPAPI player from http://www.adobe.com/go/flashplayerbeta/

Report · Nov 27, 2014

This is an administrative account. I logged into the built-in admin account as well but it was still greyed out until I installed FP 16 for opera. Anyway, its got resolved one way or another

Here is the latest crash report [@ F1398665248_____________________________] - Firefox 33.1.1 Crash Report - Report ID: 5582eca0-e67...

I notice ntdll.dll being highlighted so i checked my nvidia drivers for update. There was a week old update for it which i installed a while ago.

I will see if the issue comes up again after upgrading of gpu drivers and keep you updated about it. Please have a look at the crash report if you find something anomalous.

Please also have a look at my Application event logs if it helps

Faulting application name: FlashPlayerPlugin_15_0_0_223.exe, version: 15.0.0.223, time stamp: 0x544ece05

Faulting module name: unknown, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x00000000

Exception code: 0xc0000005

Fault offset: 0x6ee490df

Faulting process id: 0x1050

Faulting application start time: 0x01d00a2265c30acb

Faulting application path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\FlashPlayerPlugin_15_0_0_223.exe

Faulting module path: unknown

Report Id: a450c76e-7615-11e4-8356-6cc21775388e

Faulting package full name:

Faulting package-relative application ID:

Faulting application name: plugin-container.exe, version: 33.1.1.5430, time stamp: 0x54656826

Faulting module name: NPSWF32_15_0_0_223.dll, version: 15.0.0.223, time stamp: 0x544ecefc

Exception code: 0x80000003

Fault offset: 0x0035742d

Faulting process id: 0x11cc

Faulting application start time: 0x01d00a2265ad5bea

Faulting application path: C:\PROGRAM FILES (X86)\MOZILLA FIREFOX\plugin-container.exe

Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\Macromed\Flash\NPSWF32_15_0_0_223.dll

Report Id: a495279c-7615-11e4-8356-6cc21775388e

Faulting package full name:

Faulting package-relative application ID:

That's in order, after i close FF one (sometimes 2) more FP crash error pops up, after closing it, Plugin container for firefox has stopped working error shows up.

Report · Nov 27, 2014

Haha it crashed yet again

[@ F1398665248_____________________________] - Firefox 33.1.1 Crash Report - Report ID: a27a173c-97e...

Faulting application name: FlashPlayerPlugin_15_0_0_239.exe, version: 15.0.0.239, time stamp: 0x546d18b1

Faulting module name: unknown, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x00000000

Exception code: 0xc0000005

Fault offset: 0x6e4a90df

Faulting process id: 0x8b4

Faulting application start time: 0x01d00a308d5b33f9

Faulting application path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\FlashPlayerPlugin_15_0_0_239.exe

Faulting module path: unknown

Report Id: cb821292-7623-11e4-8357-6cc21775388e

Faulting package full name:

Faulting package-relative application ID:

I am giving up on this. One last thing left to do is try FP 16 beta for FF. If it still doesnt work out then going to stick with opera for a while.

Let know if something can be done.

Thanks

Report · Nov 27, 2014

16 not helping either.

Crash report for FP 16

[@ F1398665248_____________________________] - Firefox 33.1.1 Crash Report - Report ID: 52dd9581-06b...

Faulting application name: FlashPlayerPlugin_16_0_0_233.exe, version: 16.0.0.233, time stamp: 0x546e9902

Faulting module name: unknown, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x00000000

Exception code: 0xc0000005

Fault offset: 0x6e2d90df

Faulting process id: 0x17a4

Faulting application start time: 0x01d00a354324ff02

Faulting application path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\FlashPlayerPlugin_16_0_0_233.exe

Faulting module path: unknown

Report Id: 81aa8183-7628-11e4-8358-6cc21775388e

Faulting package full name:

Faulting package-relative application ID:

Report · Nov 27, 2014

Yeah, unfortunately that's the generic crash I was talking about. You can see from the huge number of associated Bugzilla bugs that this is a long and storied issue.

Report · Nov 27, 2014

Lets leave it at that then and hope the issue gets resolved with upcoming FF updates but, if not, then there are other alternatives available .

Thanks for your support.

Cheers.

Report · Nov 28, 2014

It's unlikely that this will be resolved anytime soon. I'd highly recommend moving to a different browser.

Report · Nov 29, 2014

Used Firefox Nightly 36. Works well with it without any problem.

Sticking with Opera for now until a stable version of Nightly is released.