Flash Player crashes constantly in Firefox, IE and Chrome

[android2112]

Flash player has not worked properly in months. It will work intermttently maybe 10% of the time after clicking reload/send crash report a half dozen times. It fails on all websites including

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

My system is Dell Precision T3500, Windows 7 x64. 6GB RAM, Intel W3550 @ 3.06GHz

Firefox 11.0

Shockwave Flash 11.1.102.63 (updated March 19, 2012)

I have swapped Asus Xonar DS for CL SB X-Fi Ti with no change

I have swapped GeForce GTX550Ti for ATI Firepro V5800 with no change

It fails with graphic acceleration enabled or disabled.

Browsing to any site with Flash content will usually crash the plug in.

This is highly frustrating.

[Gajananam]

Dear Schneiderman93: How do I download pepper flash? I have a windows 7 64-bit machine, and about:plugins only shows shockwave flash and nothing else. Shockwave flash, of course, crashes ad infinitum.

--regards

--gajananam

[chris.campbell]

For those encountering problems, I apologize.  I'd recommend rolling back to a previous version if the latest update hasn't resolved your problems.

How do I revert to a previous version of Flash Player?

Thanks,

Chris

[Guest]

Hey Chris, using pepper flash does help some (disable all other flash add ons). YOU have been great to try and find solutions. Thank you! Is Adobe not going to work on a fix to this problem? Doesn’t say much for the company. Anyway, thanks for your support!

[Gajananam]

Dear Sniderrickk3: Where can I find this pepper flash? does it run on windows? Would like to try this.

--regards

--gajananam

[Guest]

Try this

- In Chrome type “about:plugins” in the address bar (instead of www.)

- Click the + next to details in the top right corner

- scroll down to flash player and disable all of them except Pepper Flash (may be shortened to pep) version 11.2.31.144 (you may have 1 or 2 others.) Here's what it looks like

I'm not sure how to do this in Firefox. Also, this may not fix everyones problems, however it worked for me so I thought I'd spread the word.

[Guest]

Gajananam, if the last reply didn’t make sense, click on “view the complete discusssion” and scroll up till you find the post. good luck

[Gajananam]

Dear Sniderrick3: Thanks; Mysteriously, I am able to find the "pepper flash" in my windows xp chrome, but not in my win 7 chrome at home. I was searching for this in Windows 7 in chrome. It said my Chrome is up-to-date but I cound not locate pepper flash. Will try again tonight.

Does pepper flash completely solve the problem of crashes or just helps a little?

--Thanks again for your help

--gajananam

[Guest]

just helps some. Adobe doesn’t seem to want to fix the bugs in their flash program!

[chris.campbell]

We definitely want to find and fix these crashes!  Any crash logs you can submit will help, or if you have reproducible steps I encourage you to take a minute and open a bug at bugbase.adobe.com.

@gajananam - you might want to see if you have an update for Chrome available on your Win7 system.  I had to check mine, which prompted an update that allowed me to get the pepper build.

[bdave111]

I'll put my 2 cents in. I've experienced these plugin lock-ups ever since a flash player patch over half a year ago. I can't remember any time flash had crashed prior to this.  I keep firefox, IE and the flash player up to date, constantly hoping these crashes will cease.

One thing to note for myself is that the plugin doesnt crash on its own exactly, sometimes the audio goes (which somehow disables all of my audio), sometimes video will simply not load. It seems to be related to leaving the plugin active too long (my workstation is on almost 24/7). The short-term fix is usually to manually end the application in task manager, then restart the webpage. It may be conflicting with my drivers or my browser. I've tried updating both to no avail. My other systems with the same updates seem to have similar symptoms.

[Guest]

My answer as of right now is to disable Adobe Flash in Firefox.

With respect, you do not seem to have gotten it right for many months. This latest update is the worst of the worst. Firefox is almost unusable for any page that has Flash on it with this plugin enabled. The Flash seems to restart and restart every second or so and I'm constantly clicking.

So, no thank you, Adobe. Perhaps HTML 5 standard will become more universal and make this buggy, crash-prone, resource-hogging, irritating piece of software obsolete.

Regards,

Alan Stancliff

[chris.campbell]

@AlanStancliff02 - Did you try disabling Flash Player's Protected Mode (see the bottom of the FAQ linked below) to see if that helped in your case? 

I'm sorry you're running into this, but having looked at the crash and hang statistics on Mozilla's crash stats site, the latest version of Flash Player appears to be more stable than the last (and MUCH better than the initial 11.3 release.)  We've still got issues that we're working on and we really depend on users like yourself that run into problems for information and bug reports.

How do I troubleshoot Flash Player's protected mode for Firefox?

[Guest]

With respect, Chris, I don't use Real Player, haven't for years. It presented as many hassles as does Flash, and there were better alternatives. The rest of the suggestions are ineffective and do not address the problem.

When I looked at the Mozilla Crash site link you provided, it really had no data on Flash and FF. It was rather generalized. I'm assuming you accidently provided me with an incorrect link.

I disabled Flash, and I can't begin to tell you how much zippier and responsive FF is without it. I would be happy to send you lots of details about my specifics, but I would have to charge you for it. I'm a very busy person, and being a senior, my energy is limited. If Adobe wishes Flash to continue to be ubiquitous in the market, it needs to rely on paid bug tracking rather than allowing its users to be unpaid beta testers.

So much of Adobe's software is excellent, and Flash used to be. However, it is turning into a turkey in its old age, and I suspect that in a few years, HTML-5 will make it irrelevant. The more cynical side of me suspects that's what the beancounters at Adobe think too.

Regards,

Alan

[chris.campbell]

@AlanStancliff02 - That FAQ is a bit loaded with suggestions, but what I was trying to get at was disabling protected mode (which is listed at the bottom of the page).

If your happier with Flash Player not installed, then by all means be happy   We'll continue to try and improve the stability and performance of the Player and maybe someday you'll give it another try.

[royal3322]

I was told to disable the pepper flash but I cant seem to do it. my computer stays frozen  I am so upset with this

[Guest]

I've noticed this happening since the last update to Flash Player. This only happens on one of my PCs, not on all of them. I'm running the DirectX Debug Runtimes, which give the following output when running the plugin from Firefox:

[3280] Direct3D9: :====> ENTER: DLLMAIN(6830d9a0): Process Attach: 00000cd0, tid=000012e4

[3280] Direct3D9: :====> EXIT: DLLMAIN(6830d9a0): Process Attach: 00000cd0

[3280] Direct3D9: (INFO) :Direct3D9 Debug Runtime selected.

[3280] Direct3D9: (INFO) :======================= Hal HWVP device selected

[3280] Direct3D9: (INFO) :HalDevice Driver Style b

[3280] Direct3D9: :DoneExclusiveMode

[3280] Direct3D9: (INFO) :Using FF to VS converter

[3280] Direct3D9: (INFO) :Using FF to PS converter

[3280] Direct3D9: (INFO) :Enabling multi-processor optimizations

[3280] Direct3D9: (INFO) :DDI threading started

[3280] Direct3D9: (ERROR) :Final Release for a device can only be called from the thread that the device was created from.

When accessing the same page from Internet Explorer, this brings down the entire iexplore process (And there's no debug output through DebugView available).

Looks like the new version of flash player is invoking undefined behaviour?

[chris.campbell]

Hi Steve,

Would you be willing to open a new bug report on this over at bugbase.adobe.com?  We'll want a .dmp (from the IE crash) or Firefox crash ID if possible, along with a dxdiag report and steps to repro.  Do you know if this crash also occurs with the release directx runtime?

[Guest]

Hi Chris,

I've added bug #3162242 as requested.

Cheers,

Steve

[chris.campbell]

Thank you Steve.

[Whiteicedmstech]

Having the exact same issue on my Windows 7 64Bit laptop.  Started happening a few weeks ago.

Every single time I load my browser (Whether it is Chrome, Firefox, IE) I have my favorites set to boot up on each one, some of them have flash and as soon as the browser loads, Flash crashes.

So very very frustrated right now. 

I uninstall flash, reboot, reinstall, load browser, crash.

Any updates on the crashes for Flash?  Is there anything I can do to get help on this from Adobe?

TIA,

Whiteice

[Guest]

Don’t count on help from Adobe. I never heard anything from them. Good luck!

[NikonD700User55]

I have a miserable time with Flash as well. It crashes daily on my kids Vista machine, but last week I got a brand new Dell E6530 Windows 7 64. This machine is spanking new and has only Office and the main browsers on it, and Adobe X Standard. Flash crashes like crazy. I am on 11.3.300.268. Crashes like mad in FF, and to a lesser degree everywhere else. Funny thing is it also crashes on my Mac Book Air 2011, though not very often. These computers are brand new, unmolested, as delivered by Dell and Mac.

Geesh, even if it is going to crash a lot, can you make it crash quickly rather than hang my browsers for 2 minutes everytime? At least it does not crash the browsers - they seem to recover to the Flash Crashed image just fine. I have a BSCs and have been writing code for 17 years - unhandled exceptions usually happen very quickly unless there is a stack overflow, race, or infinite loop.

[Guest]

I cannot say how angry I am that Adobe has screwed up my computer. I used to have a system on which I could watch Channel 4OD videos an hour long on firefox without a single holdup. Since attempting to upgrade Flash (after being prompted to do so on Youtube) I now I have to refresh every three minutes. I can't even get through a five minute Youtube video without it freezing. Flash version 11.3 didn't work at all and now version 10.3 runs as I described above. To find out by researching on the internet that Adobe KNEW that there were problems and still didn't warn me on the update page makes me incredibly angry.

How about a warning on the update page in letters an inch high

"WARNING, USING THIS UPDATE MIGHT SCREW UP YOUR COMPUTER AND WE HAVEN'T GOT A CLUE HOW TO FIX IT!!"

Too late to get me back to a useable system but at least it might help others.

[Guest]

Hi

I have been having the same problem for a while and lately it became a common annoying occurance. I did a bit of diggin' around over the internet and noticed that this problem mostly happens to Windows 7 64 bit users with Microsoft .NET framework installed on the system.

So, I decided to get rid of the .NET framework and the software that made me install .NET in the first place. Luckily in my case, I no longer needed this software (Zen Lite by Carl Zeiss gmbh).

Then I used Microsoft problem reporting to load the updates (Control Panel>System and Security>Action Center>Maintenance>Check for Solutions).

After a while Windows decided that I need 12 updates. I updated the system (Update and Shut Down) and voila! Two days running and not a single crash

Hope this helps.