Flash Player Continuously Needs To Be Reinstalled

[ArtHome5b]

I cannot count the number of Flash Player crash reports I've submitted. It has to be over 1000!
I now have to uninstall then reinstall Flash Player at least 3 times daily. There is something drastically wrong with this player.

Does anyone pay attention to the crash reports?

I generally love adobe products and was a flash content developer nearly a decade ago. Now it's total garbage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ArtHome5b]

You said:

"something that the content has asked the VM to do looks like might be malicious, and we pulled the emergency stop instead of trying to risk it and continue."

On occasion I get a prompt from Firefox that a script is stalled " I forgot the exact term they used" and I have the option to stop the script or continue it.

This does happen when Flash player crashes but usually I don't get those prompts when flash stops working. I get typical flash crash report.

[jeromiec83223024]

Please don't misunderstand.  I fully believe that you're seeing this issue.  The problem is that I know we don't see this behavior across the hundreds of machines in our test environments, and we aren't getting an insane volume of similar reports.  With 1.2 billion users, an issue that affects even 0.0001% of our users generates hundreds of simultaneous forum posts.  I'm not seeing that.

Crash reports, depending on your operating system and browser, go different places.  Since I don't know specifics on either, I can't figure out where they're going.  Most of them go to the operating system vendors, and in the case of Windows, very, very rarely do they contain information that's adequate to actually help us solve the problem.  It's one of those challenges with having a virtual machine.  They end up in a bucket, aggregated by frequency.  My guess is that they happen a lot on your system, but they're not happening on a lot of systems, so they're sorted far down below the noise floor.  We actually watch the aggregate statistics closely and try to get in front of any new spikes, but it depends on the OS and browser you're using as to whether or not those reports are actually useful in helping us identify and resolve issues.  They're not magically landing on someone's Inbox whenever you submit an automated crash report, but they do help provide a high level view into overall product stability.  The Firefox crash reports are by far the most informative for us, and you have the ability to share links to those reports with me directly, even for crashes that no longer happen.

In order to understand what the root-cause is, I need to understand what makes your configuration unique.  Ideally, I'll be able to build or find a comparable configuration, reproduce the issue and then debug it.  Unfortunately, neither of you are giving me the information I need in order to do that.  Unless you're willing to provide actionable information and perform a few basic troubleshooting steps, there's not really anything else that I can do for you that's meaningful.

[sparky1141]

I also wanted to add that this problem with the 100% constant flash plugin crash since today is only happening with Firefox. I have tried to watch videos and other flash things on both Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, and they both work fine. I have even uninstalled and reinstalled both firefox and flash, and nothing seems to work. Another thing is that I have also tried the firefox and flash plugin on my other computers and laptops that I own and none of the other ones have this problem.

[sparky1141]

Somehow it started working properly and correctly all of a sudden again. I am so confused as to what is actually happening... were for over 7 hours straight I had nothing but 100% crash rate on flash in firefox, and now it works like normal.

[ArtHome5b]

I've now gone for 24 hours without a Flash Player Crash. That's very encouraging, but I have no idea why?
I'm reluctant to consider this issue closed because my experience for the last several years has been that it will crash again in the next day or two.

I'm hoping I'm wrong.

[jeromiec83223024]

In order to understand the crashes, I really need to reproduce them.  Links to content where the issue consistently happens is helpful.  If you're off the beaten path of major websites, sometimes poorly-written advertisements or straight-up malicious advertisements will be in rotation as part of third-party ad networks.  The larger, commercial ad networks inspect the Flash content that's submitted for malicious behavior, but as you can imagine, the smaller niche platforms may not be as savvy or well-resourced.  When it's a misbehaving banner, the issue will often appear transitory, as the banner will eventually fall out of rotation.

When you see the slow script dialog and continue, it's usually badly written content or malicious content.  If the content is pegging the CPU (which is why we throw the dialog in the first place), Firefox will time out after waiting 30-seconds for a response from Flash, and it will kill the process.  The crash signature that gets recorded by Firefox is the generic crash I was talking about, but this is basically working by design.

Sometimes what will happen, is that either Firefox or Flash will update automatically, but the version on the disk is different than the version that's still running in memory.  Until Firefox is fully closed, you have this mismatch that might lead to funky behavior.  We haven't shipped an automatic update in several weeks, so that's probably not the deal.  With the ability to have 30 tabs open and never really needing to reboot, we see a lot of really funky crashing that isn't something you encounter until you've been running for 100 hours or something.  Those are brutally difficult to reproduce and investigate in lab conditions. 

Anyway, I can't do much with "it's crashing" or "it went away".  If you see something that consistently causes a crash, send me a link to it.  If you don't want to post the link publicly, you can always send me a private message.

Thanks!

[ArtHome5b]

Jeremy,

I understand what you're saying. But as just an end user I don't know what else I can provide right not. It mysteriously stopped crashing,

least for the last 24 hour. It seems the same thing happened to the other user on this thread. I'm not a programmer, but from what I've read,

Flash player is very susceptible to hacking. From my limited knowledge I tend to attribute that to the 2 way communication features built into it.

Like I said I'm not a programmer or expert.

The error I get with scripting gives me 2 options. Stop the script or continue. I don't know how to give you more info on that?

I thought maybe there was a conflict with Real Player which I only keep because it allows me to download videos.

I also suspected Silverlight.

I'm doing the best I can to provide info. It's pretty mysterious that both of us in the thread and a friend having the same issue have had no crashes in the last 24 hours.

I appreciate your explanation. At least that gives me some understanding of the problem.

Art

[ArtHome5b]

My flash player has crashed again.

I noticed the "blinking" I mentioned on the browser page and when I checked to play a video, sure enough flash player had crashed and I got the crash

report window. I didn't bother sending a report:

Here's the crash info from Firefox:

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/a9cdb3d7-4f96-4abe-80f1-89b832140818

Art

[jeromiec83223024]

Can you send me a link to the page where you see the crash?

[jeromiec83223024]

Thanks for the email.  I can't use the links as sent, but I'm sure you'll get those to me soon.  Given the grouping and the generic "Flash is forced to exit cleanly" crash signature, I'm leaning towards third-party compatibility issue.

Just looking at the stuff that you have installed, I see three candidates for plug-ins that might be causing compatibility problems.

• RealPlayer
  • In Flash Player 11.3, we added Protected Mode for Firefox, which is a really important modern security feature.  One of the side effects of the enhanced security between Firefox and Flash Player was that RealPlayer could no longer scrape videos by impersonating the Firefox process.  (RealPlayer Video Downloader would act as a shim between Flash Player and Firefox, appearing to Firefox as Flash, and to Flash as Firefox, but proxying communication between the two in order to scrape the video buffer.)  Naturally, RealPlayer does this without any kind of business or engineering agreement with Adobe, and we've done a lot of work in the video pipeline over the last year.  Things may no longer be working like they were when Real implemented their scraping technology.  In order to get the video downloader working, Real recommends that their users disable Protected Mode by modifying the Flash mms.cfg configuration file.  Do you know if you did this?  If ProtectedMode is disabled and you're running into these issues, that's a really interesting data point for me.
• AVG Security Toolbar
  • I'm always suspicious of security plug-ins, because they do have a tendency to be invasive and do unexpected things to our processes.  We definitely don't test with AVG's stuff installed, but it's one thing to look at.
• Adblock Pro
  • Adblock prevents ads from being displayed on the page.  We generally play well with AdBlock Pro, but again, something that could potentially be doing invasive things that could lead to instability.

If it were me, I would uninstall all three packages via Add/Remove programs.  AVG sounds like it might be difficult to uninstall, but I saw some YouTube tutorials and stuff when searching around.  If things look stable after a day or two, I'd install the latest versions again, one at a time (I'd go AdBlock Pro > AVG > RealPlayer), with enough time between that you're confident that things are stable before moving on to the next one.  If it continues to be unstable after installing these, I need to be looking elsewhere.  If it is fine until you install a specific package, that's also super informative.

Thanks!

[markec]

This is what I keep getting, by refreshing I only get a dark blank page. It

normally takes around 6 weeks for this to occur after a reinstall, this time

it has been 3 days. I will endeavour to get the info you have asked for but

have been away from the computer.

[markec]

window['func14912']('http://searchglobe.net/?redirUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dpbol

vw.net%2Fclick-6146907-10503029%3Fsid%3D103v16vagfnje%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F

%252Fwww.macromedia.com%252Fshockwave%252Fdownload%252F%253FP1_Prod_Version%

253DShockwaveFlash&viglink=viglink&aid=861');

http://www.ultrasounds.com/. I entered this site and as I could not see the

flash sign I clicked on the link below with the result being that text

above.

[ArtHome5b]

I'm not sure where you are but it's the middle of the night here.

I just got up briefly and saw this email.

I'm attaching a screen cap of all the Aug. 15 crashes. See very bottom, I'm sure I don't have to tell you that:

Do you need them all?

I'll send you 3 or 4 now.

AVG is Kaspersky which I would not want to uninstall.

Real Player I could probably do without. It's crappy anyway I only have it to download videos or play the occasional Real video.

Adblock Pro, I'd like to keep. I'm sick of ATT putting ad emails at the top of my email from Yahoo.

I wish I could dump ATT but that would be difficult.

RealPlayer can go.

I'm usually on facebook when the crashes occur: Can't give you an exact url

I'll uninstall Real when I'm more alert around 6:30 AM Central.

Crashes:

Aug 15:

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/2c570f3e-98cd-4663-9246-54e382140816

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/ee4d04bc-c9d1-4d66-aae8-4ff592140816

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/3ae5e276-a31b-43b2-b20e-cc2c82140816

Aug. 17

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/8428f29e-b17a-48f2-9c67-982552140818

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/a9333e0b-007d-4802-ad06-d70c02140818

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/d3a760d9-d0ae-41d5-bb50-d947f2140818

[ArtHome5b]

Jerome,

I don't know if this has anything to do with FlashPlayer crashes. But here's the script failure I told you about earlier.

See attached.

[jeromiec83223024]

I don't see an attachment.  Feel free to send it to me in email.

Also, for the troubleshooting stuff, keep in mind that I'm asking you to install for troubleshooting purposes, not to permanently jettison this stuff.  I think we're on the right track with what we eliminated first, but I'm just trying to figure out what the least common denominator is.  Once we have that data, I can try and figure out how to make them play nice, or file bugs with the appropriate vendor.

[ArtHome5b]

A lot of emails back and forth.

I hope this is what you're looking for.

https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/b29cf190-cf47-42f6-8997-8b17d2140820

Crashed on Costco site.

I'll attache the screen capture.

It was sent in a prior email as I found it in my sent folder.

I was just shocked to see how many crashes I had today. I'll attache a text file with all of today's crashes so as not to clutter this email.

I also had flash crash on my Window 8 computer today. It does not have Adblock, or Real so that leaves Kaspersky.

For obvious reasons I don't want to disable that and make my system vulnerable.

Art

sending again.

Art

[ArtHome5b]

Jeromie,

While this is a layman's article, it's pretty interesting in regard to Flash and Firefox.

If Firefox is the culprit, I'm surprised you haven't had a lot more reports of the issue I'm having.

http://www.startribune.com/business/271911051.html

Art

[jeromiec83223024]

I'm really puzzled about why you're constantly hitting that generic crash.  That said Chrome doesn't have this problem.  Chrome's massive and growing market share is a reflection of the fact that it's an excellent, modern desktop browser.

We had to retrofit a sandboxing model to the NPAPI architecture, where Chrome offers a different plug-in architecture that's inherently sandboxed.  It's faster and far less fragile.

Mozilla sees a future in mobile browsers, and that vision doesn't include plug-ins, so there's not an incentive for them to invest in modernizing their NPAPI implementation to address the real-world needs of plug-ins in a modern security landscape.  If that thinking changes, we'd be more than happy to work with them to facilitate a fast, secure and resilient Flash Player installation on Firefox.

[ArtHome5b]

I use both firefox and chrome. The reason being I can keep 2 seperate face book accounts open @ the same time. Flash player crashes on Chrome also. Just not as often.  My understanding of " sandbox" is experimental testing. The other things u mention are above my knowledge level. I was shocked at all the firefox crashes. I think many occurred when I wasn't evenbon the computer. So I feel like I'm right where we started but with a little more knowlege. Sounds like conflicts with firefox & flash player.

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

[ArtHome5b]

Does the error ( screen capture attached ) mean mean anything to you?

Art

[jeromiec83223024]

I don't see the attached screenshot.  Can you just email it to me?

[ArtHome5b]

There must be something wrong with my email or yours. This is the 2nd time I sent an attachment you didn't get?

There is an attachment to this email.

Art

[jeromiec83223024]

Are you replying to the email notifications coming from the forums?  That's probably why they're not showing up.  I'm definitely not getting them, and I checked the security/spam filter as well.

I sent you my actual email address in a private message the other day.  Please send the email directly to that address.

[markec]

Can the program in the attachment help cure the ills of Flash?.

[ArtHome5b]

I've sent several attachments to Jeromie. Nos seem to have arrived. That was via email too.