[Intrepid] Having Firefox open for a while prevents new flash objects from being displayed

[Jean-Paul]

Binary package hint: firefox-3.0

When I have Firefox open for a while (I don't exactly know how long, it could be half an hour, it could be for a couple of hours), and I surf to a flash-enabled site (for example, Youtube), I don't get to see the flash content, I only get to see the background color of Firefox.
This continues until I restart Firefox (which can be a real pain because at any given time I mostly have more than 10 tabs open, and they aren't cached).

I filed the bug against Firefox-3.0, but the problem just as well might be with flashplugin-nonfree or nsplugin (actually more likely one of these, but Firefox could provide some debug info, which might be handy).

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: firefox-3.0 3.0.3+nobinonly-0ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox-3.0
Uname: Linux 2.6.27-7-generic x86_64

[Jean-Paul (jeanpaul145)]

Something I saw too late to change: the "FF background instead of flash movie" is actually a .png screenshot.

[Aaron Kelley (aaronkelley)]

I have this issue too. I am pretty sure the issue is with nspluginwrapper, and here's why:

I installed Adobe Reader 8 via the Medibuntu repositories, along with the Adobe Reader PDF plug-in which also uses nspluginwrapper to work on 64-bit systems. This plug-in also doesn't work after a while.

If you'd like, you could check to see if you have the same behavior as me:

 - Add Medibuntu repositories. (See: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu)
 - Open Synaptic package manager, and install...
acroread-dictionary-en and acroread-l10n-en
 (If you do not choose the language packages first, it will default to German when you select acroread)
acroread
mozilla-acroread

 - Open Acrobat Reader, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Internet and uncheck "Enable fast web view." (This isn't really necessary but it prevents an annoying situation where acroread is stuck using 100% CPU.)

 - Find a PDF online in Firefox and verify that it is displayed using the Adobe Reader plug-in.

 - Next time you find Flash not working, check and see if Adobe Reader is also not working. (See if you can find a case where one works and the other doesn't.)

After you're done, you can remove Adobe Reader, since it's not really useful for anything other than viewing PDFs in the browser (and since that doesn't work reliably...).

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

Aaron Kelley wrote:
> I have this issue too. I am pretty sure the issue is with
> nspluginwrapper, and here's why:
>
> I installed Adobe Reader 8 via the Medibuntu repositories, along with
> the Adobe Reader PDF plug-in which also uses nspluginwrapper to work on
> 64-bit systems. This plug-in also doesn't work after a while.
>
>

please try to (re)build the jaunty nspluginwrapper on intrepid, install
it and then reinstall flashplugin-nonfree ... does that help?

[Bartłomiej Żogała (nusch)]

Also affect Firefox 3.5.4 with nspluginwrapper-1.2.2-0ubuntu6 on Kubuntu Karmic

[Thomas Hotz (thotz-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for your bug report. Can you tell us if this bug still occurs on newer and supported Ubuntu versions?

[Aaron Kelley (aaronkelley)]

A 64-bit Flash plug-in is used now so nspluginwrapper is no longer necessary to view Flash content. However, other plug-ins using nspluginwrapper (i.e. Adobe Reader as I mentioned above) are still affected by this issue. Maybe that belongs in a separate bug.

[Thomas Hotz (thotz-deactivatedaccount)]

Please reopen a seperate bug report because I think here it could be confusing. Thank you!