This 'crash protection' was closing every flash thing I tried to run, from Hulu to the simplest sample apps in the Adobe LiveDocs. Worst 'fix/feature' ever. I've almost never had problems with Flash before this...
I concur though for me after updating to 3.6.4 and then updating my flash plugin on my mac mini Firefox wont even open. It crashes each time i try to open it.
Unfortunately after six years Ive moved to chrome. I need a browser that works and is stable. Chrome doesnt crash and i can have 3 tabs open running flash content.
So let me get this straight, you updated to 3.6.4 on Mac, had lots of problems with Flash and then decided at that time to switch to Chrome?
Hope that works well for you. I should mention though that the new out of process plug-in feature isn't in Firefox for Mac. The problem discussed here wouldn't have affected you. Any chance you were just wanting to advertise Chrome and thought this would be a good vehicle?
If you have been having trouble with Flash in Firefox on Mac for a while and upgrading to 3.6.4 didn't help, have you tried upgrading Flash itself? Do the Flash tabs inside Chrome sometimes crash or is Flash behaving differently there than in Firefox?
So far I have had no issues with Chrome crashing while running two to three tabs of content each playing flash content.
As for advertising Chrome ... that wasnt my aim, rather to let Mozilla people of my issue. Could be a wider spread issue then myself. Ive used Mozilla as my main browser since 2003, unfortunately after the update Im not able to use it at all :(
I'm also sorry that you are having problem running Flash in Firefox. There are a lot of good articles in support.mozilla.org that might help you, and you could also check out your about:crashes tab and check if any of your crashes have been linked with bugs that indicate what the problem is or whether it might have a resolution.
Flash crashes are a frustrating experience both for the browser user and the browser creator. Firefox devs have worked tirelessly to try to insulate the browser from this problem, and they continue to make further improvements. Adobe has many engineers that look at Socorro data to try to find and fix their product's crashes as well, but it is still something that way too many people bump into far too frequently.
Ask 100 hacker news Firefox users if they used Firefox 12 months ago, I bet most would say yes. As them what they use today and I bet a lot have moved to chrome for a host of issues. I certainly have. He's not advertising-- he's expressing frustration with a browser that used to be good enough that people evangelized it.
I don't mind anyone using or saying that they use Chrome. It is a great browser that is making improvements very quickly.
I can also understand people trying out a different browser because they are having problems with their current browser. That is why many people moved from IE to Firefox.
The way this particular comment was worded however, suggests that he was suddenly experiencing a problem with a feature that does not exist in Firefox 3.6.4 on Mac. That lead me to suspect the motives of his post.
The problem I have is with certain types of evangelism. For example:
Some people will exaggerate the problem they have had with competing software.
Some people will take other people's problems and comment as if it were problems they had seen first hand.
Some people will downplay problems that they have with the software they are currently evangelizing.
It happened with people evangelizing Firefox over IE. It happens with the people who evangelizing pretty much anything.
The parent poster replied that he is experiencing a problem that is different from what the article described. I'm sorry to hear that. I'd offer to help him try to resolve the problem, but it sounds like he decided that switching browsers was the right choice for him.
It's a bit frustrating for me because after ten years, Firefox developers are still working their butts off to try to make a great browser that gives people privacy, flexibility, and performance. There are hundreds of millions of Firefox users out there, and if only one percent of them experience a problem and take to the web to complain about it, that is four and a half million people complaining which creates an echo that is tough to deal with.
If one percent of the tens of millions of people using Chrome have a problem that they complain about on the web, that is half a million, and it is a whisper comparatively speaking.
One of the biggest tools Chrome has in its arsenal is it's capability to silently update their browser. If people experience a problem that is easy for Chrome developers to reproduce and solve, they can push it out quickly to stop the problem.
The silent update mechanism doesn't seem proper to some people at Mozilla though. It takes a lot of control away from the user, and it uses tricks in Windows to get around security controls that prevent it. Mozilla has instead thrown time and effort at being able to turn new releases around quicker than ever, as proved by the 3.6.6 release coming out less than a week after the previous release, and only a few days after a problem that affected millions of users was discovered.
Mozilla has also been pouring time and effort into enhancing their ability to detect and understand crashes and other problems. I know because I'm very involved with the Socorro crash reporting project.
Anyway, I think I've long since reached the point of babbling so I'll shut it. :)
I think that's more of a mac issue. I've been on windows/Firefox since 2003 and Flash has never been an issue for me. I can count on one hand the number of times it has crashed my browser in all of that time, which is to far less times than windows itself has crashed.
Despite the fact that I have all but abandoned Firefox for Chrome, I beg to differ. I've crashed Chrome a number of times doing nothing at all unusual, just basic browsing. But beyond crashing the whole program, I have had pages without plugins lock up and refuse to accept clicks, a phenomenon that I have never seen in Firefox.
FarmVille players are real, ordinary, normal people. If you want to develop software that impacts real people, target the FarmVille audience and ignore readers of Hacker News, TechCrunch, etc.
Funny how Google was preaching for years how important a fast, and speedy website for success is, and now the largest online multi-player game is triggering 30sec. timeouts. -.-
This is interesting... seeing that the change list does indeed only show that bug 574905.
What I'd find more interesting though, would be to find out why they decided to skip Fx 3.6.5. There has been quite a number of bugs that was marked fixed with that code. I wonder if those are included in 3.6.6: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=ALL%20s...
The "pre" version numbers are used for nightlies and are not always kept up to date. For example, current nightlies are still labeled "3.7a6pre" even though Firefox 3.7 was renamed Firefox 4 weeks ago, and the next release will probably be Firefox 4.0b1.
3.6.5pre has been in dev and testing and not all of the changes put in it were validated so it isn't ready to ship yet. Rather than pushing out code that wasn't fully tested, or releasing a version called 3.6.5 that included different code from 3.6.5pre, they branched around it and released 3.6.6 with just the one change needed. I imagine they'll retire 3.6.5pre and move everything over to 3.6.7pre where they will continue working on the next release.
