flashplugin causes firefox to hang

[Sergio Callegari]

The flash plugin installed with the flashplugin-installer or adobe-flashplugin packages causes firefox to frequently hang when browsing web pages including flash videos or animations.

The browser is capable to recover. After about 1 minute, the browser comes back being functional. However, for all this time the browser remains completely unresponsive, not just in the web page, but also in its menus.

The culprit is certainly the plugin, since the issue with the firefox hangs goes away by merely disabling it.

Unfortunately, the flash plugin usable with firefox is extremely problematic in addition to being obsolete and the way in which firefox manages it (with the whole browser hanging when the plugin has issues).

In addition to reporting the bug, I strongly suggest that Ubuntu finds ways to get rid of this plugin, either by

1) supporting development of the Fresh Player Plugin and distributing this one instead of the npapi flash plugin; or
2) providing a "fake" flash plugin for firefox that merely shows a box with a text directing the user to take advantage of other browsers to see flash videos and animations.

[Naël (nathanael-naeri)]

Thanks for reporting this bug.

Much has changed regarding the Flash plugin in the last few months. Adobe has started supporting the NPAPI plugin again, which is now version 24.0 compared to 11.2 when you reported this bug. So perhaps things are better now: can you please check if the current version solves your issues?

The current NPAPI version (for Firefox) is in the packages flashplugin-installer and adobe-flashplugin (install either one). If you also have a PPAPI version installed (e.g. pepperflashplugin-nonfree), make sure that you don't have the package browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash, otherwise Firefox will use the PPAPI version through this wrapper (which works fine too, but won't show if the bug you reported is still current).

Thanks.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for adobe-flashplugin (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]