firefox + flash video: crash playing second movie
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
firefox-3.0 (Ubuntu) |
Invalid
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: firefox-3.0
Firefox 3.0 beta 4 + flashplugin-nonfree leads to crashes playing second (or third or fourth) flash movie clips. This problem has been reported many times but so far all reports seem to be labeled 'invalid' because the report does not contain the needed data. I can not see whether this report contains a valid stack trace, nor do I know whether the proprietary flash plugin leads itself to producing such.
As this is a real, existing and annoying problem and as the proprietary flash plugin unfortunately remains the only way to play the majority of the flash video content out 'there' on the web it would be good to find a way to limit these crashes.
Short of breaking into Adobe to fix the bugs in their software I'm afraid there is no real solution (given that the crashes stem from problems in the flash plugin and not from problems in Firefox or any related plugins that is) other than to run the flash plugin as an external process which can be respawned if it dies. This seems to be the way the Opera browser handles flash (and other plugins) judging from the presence of 'operapluginwra
It is clear that this approach to handling unstable plugins leads to fewer crashes related to those plugins. It also seems to lower performance of flash somewhat. I for one would be willing to sacrifice some performance with unstable proprietary software to gain immunity from the many bugs hidden in the proprietary code. For free plugins this approach should not be necessary as it is possible to actually fix the bugs. With proprietary code this is not possible.
ProblemType: Crash
Architecture: i386
CrashCounter: 1
Date: Mon Mar 31 13:15:43 2008
Disassembly: 0xb7ff6424:
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/lib/
NonfreeKernelMo
Package: firefox-3.0 3.0~b4+
PackageArchitec
ProcCmdline: /usr/lib/
ProcEnviron:
PATH=/
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/bash
Signal: 11
SourcePackage: firefox-3.0
Stacktrace: #0 0xb7ff6424 in ?? ()
StacktraceTop: ?? ()
ThreadStacktrace:
Title: firefox crashed with SIGSEGV
Uname: Linux 2.6.25-
UserGroups: adm admin audio cdrom dialout dip fax floppy fuse lpadmin netdev plugdev powerdev pulse-rt sambashare scanner src tape video
I see that this report does not contain a stack trace. I will try to get one using gdb and attach it to this bug report.