Firefox crashes on startup after updating to flashplugin-installer:amd64 27.0.0.170ubuntu0.16.04.1

[Cory Bloor]

A couple hours ago, Firefox crashed on me for seemingly no reason. A flashplugin-installer error dialog popped up, which I dismissed without reading. I'd seen a similar dialog that said "flashplugin-installer failure to download extra data files" a few times before and had been ignoring it because I had been unable to fix it.

When I restarted Firefox, I discovered it would crash on startup every time. After trying a few different ways to get it running, I discovered the cause was a Bus Error, and that neither starting with a fresh profile nor starting in safe mode would help.

Looking through /var/log/apt/history.log, I noticed an unattended-upgrade which corresponded to about the time that Firefox first crashed. The important bit seemed to be:
flashplugin-installer:amd64 (27.0.0.159ubuntu0.16.04.1, 27.0.0.170ubuntu0.16.04.1)

I don't really use flash much, so rather than figure out how to downgrade, I just tried `sudo apt purge flashplugin-installer`, and Firefox started fine after that. For me, the problem is solved, but I wanted to report the bug in case it still affects others.