HELP !!
“Shockwave Flash Player may be busy, or”…blah blah blah
This recurring popup has been aggravating me for months if not years. Somebody on this board must know how to fix it once and for all.
Win7, Firefox, and everything is up to date.
“Change your browser / operating system” type answers are not welcome.
Check your add/remove programs for something called Shockwave. If you have it, uninstall it. It’s a different player, separate from Flash, that very very few websites still use.
Try the solutions here: Warning: Unresponsive Plugin; Shockwave flash may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. | Firefox Support Forum | Mozilla Support
Wherever you can, set pages to use HTML5 instead of Flash. Example for using doing so in YouTube.
Use Flashblock to prevent it from loading on most pages except the ones you want to use Flash on. Because of iPhones, more and more websites are switching to HTML5, so you should need Flash less and less.
Ultimately, though, I don’t think you can altogether escape this problem without switching browsers (sorry!), but let me at least try to explain it: Firefox is the only modern browser that doesn’t use per-tab processes, which means that whenever Flash or another plugin has an issue – and they very often do – it will take down all of Firefox, and all your tabs, with it. Chrome, IE, and Safari do not have this problem and will just crash-close the offending tab. Mozilla is working on solving this with a project of theirs, so maybe the situation will be better in the future.
No apology necessary- I only meant to ward off smartass hit and run non-answers. Thank you for providing exactly the kind of response I was hoping for. Within 15 minutes, no less.
Cheers.
You’ve got some true things in there, but your conclusions are unfounded. Yes, Firefox does not have per-tab processes, and that does mean that something happening in a bad tab can take down all of Firefox. Per-tab processes have nothing to do with keeping Flash itself tied to the browser. All modern browsers separate Flash from main browser components. And Flash itself launches multiple processes per tab. So Flash crashing will not take down the browser. That’s been the case since Firefox 3.6.
This problem popped up early on when Adobe added sandboxing to Flash. I still leave sandboxing turned off to avoid this problem, as every time I’ve turned it back on, I’ve run into problems.
So I suggest turning it off, and seeing if Flash stops hanging. To do so, do the following.
[LIST=1]
[li]Open the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg in Notepad.[/li][li]Add the line ProtectedMode=0[/li][li]Save the file to your Desktop.[/li][li]Copy the file from your desktop back to C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash.[/li]
That said, I will say that Adobe doesn’t seem to be trying very hard to make Flash work well with Firefox. So I do still recommend avoiding Flash when possible. Not only can you enable HTML5 mode on YouTube, you can also use the Firefox addon Video WithOut Flash for many other video sites.
I also agree that you should either have Flash Block installed, or go to Addons (from the three-line hamburger menu), goto plugins, and set Flash to “Ask to Activate.” Also, I suggest restarting Firefox every few days or so if you use a lot of Flash content. The Restartless Restart addon will make this easier.
Finally, if this seems like a little much, I encourage you to try out Chrome. So far, the only thing I’ve found it flat out can’t do that Firefox can is multi-row tabs. And now that Firefox and Chrome look so much more alike, it’s much easier to transition.
His suggestions worked for me, as per my post in the thread linked below. Far less trouble than resetting FF or putting up with Chrome. (I am not disagreeing with your statement.)
I thought of that before posting, and I want to agree with you in theory… but in practice, the last time I used Firefox regularly (which was about 1.5 years ago), I don’t remember it working that well. Maybe the Flash crash catcher wasn’t great at knowing when it crashed, or maybe whatever was going on didn’t qualify as a hard crash. So in one of the tabs, Flash would be doing something and stalling… and then the whole browser looks like it’s crashed because that one tab is frozen waiting for that one instance of Flash, even if it’s sandboxed. In effect, even if technically Flash was running in the background and still responding browser calls, the human-facing UI did not make this seem like it was the case; it’d just seem like the whole browser stalled.
But it’s been a while and maybe memory is wrong. If there’s an easy way to test this by forcing Flash to crash, please let me know.