Flash Player continuously crashing in Mozilla and Chrome

Report · Feb 15, 2017

Since 3 days I am facing the problem with FP, as it crashes immediately after loading the web page

Report · Mar 17, 2017

@jeromiec83223024

Very good news - we rolled our organization forward to 25.0.127 on Tuesday and they have had no crashes since. Previously their software was crashing every 10-15 minutes and we'd had to take them back to an older version.

Thanks Adobe team for the fix!

Report · Mar 17, 2017

That's great news, thanks for the feedback.

As an aside, we can always use more feedback from our Beta program, particularly from people running complex enterprise apps.

If you find an issue that impact you, you're always welcome to PM me or chriscampbell and we'll get it over to the engineering team. We're highly motivated to keep similar problems from making it out into the world.

You can get more info and access to our week beta builds here:

http://www.adobe.com/go/flashplayerbeta

Report · Apr 28, 2017

I recently updated Firefox 53 and Adobe Flash Player to the newest version 25.0.0.148. I only use flash player on sites that still require it other wise I keep it turned off. On those sites as soon as I enable the Flash Player plugin the browser hangs or crashes. I have been having this problem mostly on www.nascar.com that still uses flash video's. The most recent time was trying to play the following video (Monster Energy Series Qualifying Clips ). The video started and then hung Firefox. I ended up shutting down the browser and trying again with the same result. I am running the newest driver for my Nvidia Ge-force GTX 750 ti video card. I have tried with hardware acceleration on and off with no difference. My motherboard is a ASUS 970 pro gaming / AURA model running a AMD FX-4300 CPU and 16GB of memory with all up to date drivers. I do not have the system overclocked since I would like to find an answer to this problem without throwing other things into the mix. I have tried disabling all add-ons and themes I have in Firefox and I still get the hangs and crashes. I have also tried a ASUS R7 250 video card again with all up to date drivers and the problem still happens. Don't to know what to do to get these flash video's playing without hanging or crashing Firefox.

Report · Apr 29, 2017

Crash reports would be useful. You can go to about:crashes in Firefox, open the first few links in new tab(s), and then just copy and paste the resulting links in a reply. You don't have to wait for the actual crash reports to populate -- Firefox will handle it in the background.

That said, I'm 85% sure I know what it's going to be. Most likely, you're running into the classic Flash/Firefox hang. If you're running complex content (and most content in 2017 is complex), it's very easy for Flash and Firefox to exchange enough messages that it overwhelms the operating system's ability to deliver them reliably and in-order. This condition seems timing related to some degree, and some machines see it *way* more than others, but it always comes down to one side of the conversation waiting for a message or response that never comes. At that point, Firefox's hang detection kicks in and kills the plug-in process, and you see the crashed plugin dialog.

Long story short, if that's what's going on, moving to 64-bit Firefox will probably fix it. The 64-bit variant of Firefox includes a native NPAPI sandbox. This means that we don't need to use our bolt-on sandbox like we do for 32-bit Firefox, and the architectural improvement reduces the overall amount of traffic sent between Firefox and Flash by a multiple.

Just select the 64-bit variant, here:

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

Report · May 29, 2017

You want crash reports? Here you go, the 10 oldest and 10 most recent -- I'm so tired of the incessant crashing. A similar Flash/Mozilla conflict happened a lot in Oct, 2016, too. I don't recall what the solution was then, but the system had been stable from then until March, 2017:

...

No doubt there'll be more crash reports in the coming days and weeks...

Report · May 30, 2017

That's perfect, thanks.

First things first, these are crash reports from SeaMonkey and not Firefox. While we don't explicitly block Flash Player on SeaMonkey, it's not a product that we test or support. The list of supported configurations can be found here: Tech specs | Adobe Flash Player

That said, it doesn't look like Flash Player is your problem. None of the crash reports you provided involve Flash Player.

One of the crashes you provided was related to an Out of Memory condition. You have a system with a *lot* of RAM, but because you're running a 32-bit browser, only 2GB is available to the process. Most of the others are related to hardware acceleration code in SeaMonkey. I didn't do a perfect job of collating the crashes. I think there are only 3-4 unique ones, but since none of them are ours, I wasn't concerned with bucketing them perfectly.

I'd really recommend moving to actual 64-bit Firefox, which would make all of the RAM available to the browser (and the sparse address space confers some significant benefits in terms of malware defense). It's also my experience that 64-bit Firefox is much more stable on Win10, and the native NPAPI sandbox built into 64-bit Firefoox solves some of the long-standing stability problems with Flash Player on 32-bit Firefox (none of which you're actually hitting currently, but still).

I don't know a lot about SeaMonkey or how resources at Mozilla are applied to it, but my guess is that in terms of Windows 10 stability, Firefox proper is going to be where most work has happened recently.

You can get the 64-bit Firefox from here:

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

Since almost all of these crashes are in SeaMonkey's DirectX 11 code, you might also want to make sure you have the latest available graphics drivers for your system.

Report 1: This is actually a Seamonkey crash, and not Firefox. Seamonkey is crashing because the system is out of memory. Flash Player is not on the stack.

Report 2: This is a crash in SeaMonkey, and Flash is not on the stack.

Report 3: This is a crash in SeaMonkey. Flash Player is not on the stack.

Report 4: Same as crash 2

Report 5: This is a crash in SeaMonkey's hardware acceleration code. Flash Player is not on the stack.

Report 6: Same as crash 2

Report 7: A different crash in SeaMonkey's hardware acceleration code. Flash Player is not on the stack.

Report 8: Same as crash 2

Report 9: Same as crash 2

Report 10: Same as crash 2.

Report 91: Same as crash 2.

Report 92: Another different crash in SeaMonkey's hardware acceleration code. Flash Player is not on the stack.

Report 93: Same as crash 2

Report 94: This is a crash in SeaMonkey that, according to the related bug notes, has recently been fixed.

Report 95: Same as crash 2

Report 96: Another crash in SeaMonkey's hardware acceleration code. Flash Player is not on the stack.

Report 97: Another crash in SeaMonkey's hardware acceleration code. Flash Player is not on the stack .

Report 98: Another crash in SeaMonkey's hardware acceleration code. Flash Player is not on the stack .

Report 99: Another crash in SeaMonkey's hardware acceleration code. Flash Player is not on the stack .

Report 100: Same as crash 2