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Flash can freeze Firefox on Mac

By glazou on Sunday 5 September 2010, 09:56 - Mozilla - Permalink

I have no idea how to file that bug in BMO and I'm not even sure it's a BMO bug since it's more probably a Flash plugin bug so let me describe it here:

  • the Firefox 3.6.8 home page recommended me recently to update my Flash plugin on my Mac OS X box (Snow Leopard)
  • so I did...
  • since that day, many web sites showing Flash-based videos freeze making the browser totally unusable with CPU usage > 95%. A good example is http://lci.tf1.fr/
  • I originally thought a bad interaction between Flash and AdBlockPlus was guilty but I removed ABP and the problem is still here ; the Flash plugin is almost certainly guilty here

The new Flash plugin was probably pushed to users for security reasons. But for UX reasons, it's probably better to stop pushing it until this problem is gone...

Comments

1. On Sunday 5 September 2010, 10:46 by teoli

One thing to try:
Try to deactivate the Hardware acceleration in the prefs of the Flash plugin (not sure if Mac's Flash has it, but on Windows this cured several problems).

On Fx4beta, I would have also hinted you to disable Flash in a separate process, but you are with Fx 3.6.x.

2. On Sunday 5 September 2010, 10:52 by Ludovic

Did you try to follow beltzner recents intsructions at http://beltzner.ca/mike/2010/08/05/... , that would help narrowing down the issue.

3. On Sunday 5 September 2010, 11:09 by Wladimir Palant

I noticed the new Flash version misbehaving on Windows as well. I occasionally see the whole browser freeze for a few seconds when a Flash video loads - despite OOPP. And switching to a different page when a Flash video is running takes an awful long while. All this used to be different.

4. On Sunday 5 September 2010, 17:17 by Anonymous

AdBlock Plus, you mean.