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Flash Debug Player crashing Firefox

After I updated Firefox past version 3.6.6 I started noticing some weird behavior when Flash Debug Player threw an error. Sometimes I would not be able to dismiss the error popup. Instead, it would freeze for almost a minute and then crash the flash plugin. It was nice that Firefox itself didn’t crash, but I found it quite irritating always having to kill the plugin-container.exe process to skip having to wait the 45 seconds every single time I visited a website with poorly written flash ads (majority of websites!).

Then I read nwebb’s blog post about a fix to this problem. To quote the blog post:

You need to go in to the Firefox config settings (type about:config in to the location bar) and search for dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32.dll – double click that to set it to false. You may also need to set dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs to -1. Now restart your browser and you should once again be able to debug your apps and dismiss the warnings as you used to do in the good old days. Ahhhhh bliss.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 11:36 and is filed under Firefox, Flash.

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5 Responses to “Flash Debug Player crashing Firefox”

  1. Egill Antonsson Says:
    August 20th, 2010 at 19:37

    This was really useful,
    Firefox was always crashing when I was debugging
    the project I’m working on.
    Maybe I’ll walk 5 meters to your desk and ask you in person to help me
    with my troubles next time ;)

    Egill Wonder.

  2. Matt Says:
    September 1st, 2010 at 04:10

    Thanks for the tip! This has been driving me crazy for the past week or so.

  3. Chris Says:
    December 27th, 2010 at 10:07

    Thanks for this, i was really annoyed too every time flash debug shows the error and it hangs..

  4. Tobias Says:
    January 5th, 2011 at 16:09

    Thanks for this. I actually filed a bug report at the almighty Bugzilla and basically got told that they don’t care because it’s a “bug” with Flash and not Firefox, and they could tell that immediately so all my points must have been null and void.

    Never mind the fact that it never occured before they introduced this “crash prevention” feature (which ironically crashes Firefox a TON more than before, if you count the freezes as crashes – which I do).
    Never mind the fact that a setting change in Firefox fixes the “bug” with Flash.
    And finally, never mind that Adobe actually brought out a new Plugin version that works around Firefox’ problem with its event queue – which lets you click the Dismiss All button – and Firefox *still* doesn’t respond until plugin-container.exe is killed.

    Magic. Thanks for this post.

  5. Adrian-Ionut Beschea Says:
    December 23rd, 2011 at 14:10

    setting dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs to -1 actually makes it worse on Firefox 8.0.
    dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32.dll is no longer available.

    for now, I set the timeout to 5 seconds to reduce the hang time.

    Is there a workaround for this ?
    Thannks