An African or European swallow?

September 17, 2010 3:40 PM

How to get Firefox to un-crash Adobe Flash player so I can get on with my life.

On my humble net-label's website, I post albums in bandcamp's "venti" sized embedded player-- which is usually real snazzy. Today I updated it so I have (well, had) 20 of these players on the page at once, for current featured releases. For a few shufflings worth-- during a span of about 15 minutes-- they were all up, all running.

Then they all went kooky, showed what I now know to be the 'plug-in crash' icon, and said that the Adobe Flash plug-in had crashed.

I followed the instructions and updated my version of the plug-in, then updated to the most recent version of Firefox.

Now, my site won't even show the players at all. I know it's not a problem with my code, because I didn't change it at all during this whole fiasco.

(I use simple html and javascript in Yahoo Small Business's editor)

When I view my site, it looks like nothing's there, and when I click and drag on the empty space, as you would do to highlight text, it shows black rectangles on the spots where the players should be.

Needless to say, I wonder what to do in order to fix this, as my to-do list (items #2 to #2million) festers during this layover.

posted by herbplarfegan to technology (5 answers total)

I would be inclined to stop the plugin-container.exe process for firefox (I assume you're using windows) and then close down Firefox and start it up again.
posted by I_pity_the_fool at 4:01 PM on September 17, 2010

Yeah, it's the dreaded plugin container, Mozilla's brilliant idea of economizing Firefox by outsourcing Flash to an external process that grinds your computer to a halt.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:38 PM on September 17, 2010

Oh! Also, if you're running NoScript, be sure to update that, too.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:41 PM on September 17, 2010

okay- I followed the instructions for stopping the plugin-container.exe process for firefox, and I've updated everything in the update checker.

Same problem with my site, but now the update checker also is still saying that updates are needed, then when I click Update Now it says Error: already installed.
posted by herbplarfegan at 6:16 PM on September 17, 2010

OK, un- and re-install firefox?
posted by I_pity_the_fool at 5:38 AM on September 19, 2010