Comment 3 for bug 244037

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.