could do with facility to reinitialise plugins in firefox

[Robert Persson]

Binary package hint: firefox

This is a feature request, and probably not one that you will consider exactly high priority, but here it is anyway because it would save me a lot of pain right now...

The Adobe Flash plugin fails A LOT, or at least it does so on my amd64 system. From the moment it does so, every new flash animation or movie shows in the browser as nothing more than a pale grey rectangle. The only way to get flash working again is to restart the browser. While I fully understand that this is a flash problem and not a firefox one (I get exactly the same problem using opera), the fact is that adobe aren't exactly busting a gut to solve this. Flash is essential to get access to some of the most popular and important web content, such as youtube, myspace and many feature of facebook. Without a half-viable flash player desktop ubuntu is crippled.

Therefore would it be possible to have a feature built into firefox (or an extension) that would allow us to reinitialise the flash plugin (unload and reload?) after it fails, without having to restart the browser?

Such a feature, of course, would also be useful in the hypothetical situation that another proprietary plugin were to misbehave in the same way.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Can you give me exactly what it is you want?
What exactly do you mean reinitialise?
The way i see it is that this would be the same as closing browser and re-opening it since flash becomes inactive when browser is closed and than loads back up with it is needed

[Robert Persson (ireneshusband)]

Yes, it would be the same as restarting the browser, just without the serious usability hit of having to restart the browser a lot.

Actually things have changed a bit since I made this report. The bug that was causing Flash to die very frequently has been fixed. Flash still dies sometimes, but having to restart the browser once in a while is less serious than having to restart it for every other YouTube movie. I do still find I have to reload pages a lot because the Flash objects don't display first time, but that's not the same thing.

In other words it is still an issue, but as I said before, not exactly a pressing one.

[xteejx (xteejx)]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100409 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100409 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3

"This is a feature request, and probably not one that you will consider exactly high priority, but here it is anyway because it would save me a lot of pain right now...

The Adobe Flash plugin fails A LOT, or at least it does so on my amd64 system. From the moment it does so, every new flash animation or movie shows in the browser as nothing more than a pale grey rectangle. The only way to get flash working again is to restart the browser. While I fully understand that this is a flash problem and not a firefox one (I get exactly the same problem using opera), the fact is that adobe aren't exactly busting a gut to solve this. Flash is essential to get access to some of the most popular and important web content, such as youtube, myspace and many feature of facebook. Without a half-viable flash player desktop ubuntu is crippled.

Therefore would it be possible to have a feature built into firefox (or an extension) that would allow us to reinitialise the flash plugin (unload and reload?) after it fails, without having to restart the browser?

Such a feature, of course, would also be useful in the hypothetical situation that another proprietary plugin were to misbehave in the same way."

This was originally reported in Launchpad at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/244037

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Youtube
2. Watch Adobe flash plugin crash
3. See that there is no other way to fix other than restarting firefox
Actual Results:
Flash (and other plugins) can crash Firefox.

Expected Results:
Flash (and other plugins) are run slightly outside of firefox, giving firefox the ability to shut them off and restart them if they cause problems.

[Timeless-bemail (timeless-bemail)]

this sounds like you're using nspluginwrapper which is a third party plugin. in 1.9.2.4 you shouldn't need to use this.

please file your bug in ubuntu's bug tracker (or whereever nspluginwrapper lives).

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug in the upstream bug tracking system this is a tremendous help. Launchpad has the ability to watch lots of upstream bug trackers and this can be done by following the procedure documented at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Watches. I've added the bug watch for this bug report. Also, this is not yet implemented so I have Confirmed this report.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

This should actually be fixed with Firefox 3.6.4 when it is released.

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Whether the reporter is using nspluginwrapper or not is not the issue. This is a feature request for implementation of a "shutdown and restart" script/button type thing for plugins within Firefox, it has nothing to do with installed plugins.

[Mozilla-bugs-micahscomputing (mozilla-bugs-micahscomputing)]

Should this just be duped against the OOPP master bug?

[Timeless-bemail (timeless-bemail)]

seems like a waste (duping), but yes, in 1.9.2.4 if you kill -9 the mozilla plugin host then you could reinitialize flash. I'm not quite sure how we'd want to expose such a thing, it doesn't seem like something for which we'd want to allocate space in a ui. One should not create a ui based on the assumption that another module will always be broken.

I'd like to note that even your original reporter has noted his casus belli has gone away.

micah: if you want to mark this as wfm w/ 1.9.2.4 (when it happens), i'd be ok w/ that.

[Mozilla-bugs-micahscomputing (mozilla-bugs-micahscomputing)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> seems like a waste (duping), but yes, in 1.9.2.4 if you kill -9 the mozilla
> plugin host then you could reinitialize flash. I'm not quite sure how we'd want
> to expose such a thing, it doesn't seem like something for which we'd want to
> allocate space in a ui. One should not create a ui based on the assumption that
> another module will always be broken.

I noticed that there was something in the UI that prompted me to restart flash, hence that's why I thought it would be solved by 1.9.2.4

[Timeless-bemail (timeless-bemail)]

it will. but duping 30 hang bugs to a bug which implements a feature isn't really particularly useful.

[Mechanical snail (replicator-snail)]

Can't you just disable and re-enable the plugin in Tools/Add-ons/Plugins? If so, this isn't necessary.

[Mozilla-bugs-micahscomputing (mozilla-bugs-micahscomputing)]

This has worked since Firefox 3.6.4 with the Out of process plugins.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

This has existed in Firefox since 3.6.4 at least for Flash with out of process plugins. Please report any other issues you may find.