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Web browsers become unresponsive due to Flash plugin (Problem has re-emerged after a prior fix)

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
September 24, 2015
1 reply
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I was part of a discussion group in which many Lenovo users were experiencing problems with the Flash plugin on their web browsers (Re: A plugin (Shockwave Flash) isn't responding. forums.adobe.com/message/7992871#7992871). The problems largely consisted of unresponsive messages on Chrome, Edge, and IEon websites such as Facebook, Youtube, Gmail, and others that use chat or play html5 videos. In Chrome, the message says that a plugin (Flash) has become unresponsive and then the page can no longer be interacted with. In Edge, it just ceases to respond. These issues were fixed for a few days now, but after my Windows updated itself again last night, the problems came back.

Has anyone else seen these issue make a comeback? I'm using a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 with Windows 10 x64.

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Correct answer vanchico

This week was Patch Tuesday, so Windows update would have included the regularly scheduled monthly Flash release. Most of our releases have proactive security fixes (we work closely with researchers and the industry to try and stay a head of the latest security research), so nothing really out of the ordinary there.

You said "resolved (apparently)", which makes me think that the symptoms maybe just disappeared mysteriously for a few days without any action on your part. I'm not sure why they would go away after an upgrade and then come back.

Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration in Chrome? After all the changes that you made, is it still disabled?

If it's hardware related and affecting IE/Edge, I can't do much about that at the moment. At some point the switch in IE that disables hardware stopped disabling it for Flash, but it works fine in Chrome.

Here's the guide on turning off hardware:

How do I disable or enable hardware acceleration?

Hi Jeromie,

Yes, hardware acceleration has been off in both the Chrome settings and via the global settings for a while (before the unresponsive error came back again). Will let you know if this problem persists. Hopefully, it was a one-off thing. I"ll try to use Chrome right to see if the error pops up again.

Thanks again!

jeromiec83223024

Community Manager

Have you rebooted the machine since the symptoms started? If not, do the symptoms go away after reboot?

What step did you take as part of the previous thread that resolved the issues for you originally?

V

vanchicoAuthor

Inspiring

Hi Jeromie,

Thanks for the reply! Thanks for the reply. The issue was resolved (apparently) after Windows issued a flash security update and Chrome update their newest 45 version browser to from 45.0.2454.99 from 2454.93. I also took the steps of uninstalling and reinstalling my graphics and audio drivers. However, having done the latter two steps and also rebooting the computer and resetting IE and other browsers using internet options and clearing the cache (as well as all data using the Flash Control Panel), the issues persist in Edge, Chrome, and IE. So far, as before, Firefox is not affected, and this could be due to the fact that I don't have Flash installed on my laptop.

Both Microsoft and Chrome and have been pretty bad at troubleshooting his with me, and you guys at Adobe seem to be the only ones who pay attention, so I appreciate your attention to this.

V

vanchicoAuthor

Inspiring

No, this is a tough situation. We added hardware acceleration to enable Flash Player to run effectively on the sub-laptop class of portable machines (netbooks, ultrabooks, etc), where it's really important to offload processing to the GPU for decent performance and power consumption. My guess is that this is also driving the trend towards hardware in modern browsers as well.

It's telling that Google has also disabled the HD 4000 for HTML Canvas (the closest Flash analog in HTML), and although they haven't explicitly disabled Hardware Video Decoding, calls to video decode are failing, which means everything is falling back to software and are getting processed on the general-purpose CPU.

WARNING: Hardware acceleration is unavailable.

GpuProcessHostUIShim: The GPU process exited normally. Everything is okay.

[8864:5480:0929/082614:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/082620:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/083117:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 3

[8864:5480:0929/083504:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/083509:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/083649:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/083949:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/084000:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/084019:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/084022:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/090247:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/090333:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

[8864:5480:0929/090454:ERROR:gpu_video_decode_accelerator.cc(280)] : HW video decode not available for profile 1

I don't see these log messages in Chrome when I disable hardware acceleration in Flash, so I don't believe that this is a result of disabling HW Acceleration. My guess is that HW Acceleration wasn't working regardless of the flag's state (you should probably re-enable it), and that this is failing at the driver level. Everything else in turn is falling back to software, which causes the high CPU usage that triggers the slow script dialog in Flash.

There appear to be drivers available from a week or two ago. I'd give those a shot and see if that fixes things. Make sure to enable hardware acceleration in Flash and the Browser again, or you're definitely not going to see any improvement.

Downloads for Intel® HD Graphics 4000 for 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ Processors‌

On a positive note, Intel is definitely working on these drivers. They're averaging a new version once a month lately.

Hi Jeromie Clark‌,

I got the error again this morning, but in stalled Flash Player 19 debugger (Flash Player for Opera and Chromium based applications – PPAPI) from Adobe's website: Download Adobe Flash Player 19 Beta for Desktops - Adobe Labs

I disabled the built-in Chrome Flash plugin and kept the beta PPAPI I downloaded enabled

Then I also changed a few things on Chrome that I found here: Hardware acceleration for flash videos in Google Chrome - Ask Different‌

"To force Chrome / Chromium to use hardware acceleration, open a new tab, type "chrome://flags" (without quotes), search for "Override software rendering list", enable it and restart Chrome / Chromium."

and

"From chrome://flags I disable "Disable hardware-accelerated video decode" and relaunch my Chrome browser."

I think it might've worked. I did not have to restart my laptop and the videos on YouTube, Facebook, and other sites started working again, whereas before, I'd have to clear my cache, browsing history, etc, and restart.

If other have similar problems like me, perhaps you can refer them to these steps..... But then again, with my luck, the error will come up again.

UPDATE: It happened again, but this time I could just close the tabs and go back to the page and watch the video without problems. This is weird, no? I don't understand my computer.

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