Flash problems in Firefox?

January 18, 2005 5:43 PM

This may be old hat, but does anyone know why Firefox (any version) chokes on Flash? It bogs down on both Mac and PC and generally runs terribly whenever anything Flash-related is on the webpage. Also, can anything be done to fix the problem that doesn't involve blocking the flash movies/animation?
posted by riffraff to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

I reinstalled Flash player after Firefox. Aside from investing in a faster processor...Firefox ain't perfect yet.
posted by jsavimbi at 5:48 PM on January 18, 2005

I've never encountered any problems with Flash in Firefox, and I've been using it (exclusively) since 0.93. Perhaps the MozillaZine Forums can help?
posted by Token Meme at 6:19 PM on January 18, 2005

Have you made the changes that many people have posted that are supposed to speed up Firefox? One of them involves enabling pipelining or something.

I might be wrong, but I seem to recall one of the developers explaining that it wasn't enabled by default because it can cause bad interactions in flash.
posted by Stunt at 6:26 PM on January 18, 2005

Works fine for me. Better than in IE, in fact.
posted by bingo at 6:29 PM on January 18, 2005

There have been a raft of Firefox questions over the last couple of weeks... I really would second the forums.mozillazine.org suggestion above. Great community, very helpful (unless you post technical questions in the builds group.. heh...)
posted by socratic at 7:26 PM on January 18, 2005

"I really would"... when did I turn into an English grandmother?
posted by socratic at 7:27 PM on January 18, 2005

The plug-in should all the rendering directly without slowing down. It should have the exact same performance in Netscape or IE. I've never noticed any difference in Windows, even on pretty marginal computers on intensive flash (they were both slow). Now flash on Linux, on the other hand...
posted by zsazsa at 7:35 PM on January 18, 2005

As an aside, it never hurts to install flashblock - when you want the flash to run, it does. When you don't, it don't.

Also, I haven't had any similar problems. How does flash run on IE?
posted by puke & cry at 7:42 PM on January 18, 2005

Yes, hows the comparison? Whats your processor speed?
posted by jeremias at 4:25 AM on January 19, 2005

Firefox has no problems with flash on my computer (Mac OS 10.3.7).

The flash plugin installer (i only know about Macs) has an "uninstall" option. I'd try that, then reinstall.
posted by reflecked at 4:33 AM on January 19, 2005

Response by poster: I have a 800 G4 eMac with 1 GB RAM running OS 10.3.7 at work and an Athlon 2.4 PC running WinXP Pro with 512 MB RAM at home. On my Mac, IE 5.2 runs flash stuff just fine, as does Safari 1.2.4. I've got all the latest browser versions on my PC but Firefox chokes on most flash stuff. I've also updated my flash plug-ins on both platforms with hardly any improvement.

This site, for example, runs okay with both IE and Safari on my Mac, but the same site causes Firefox 1.0 to crash.

I recall that I did try the "pipeline hack" suggestion posted before, but only on my Mac, not my PC, and both are equally terrible at flash.

Thanks for the link to the forums; I'll check there too. I'll also try that uninstall/reinstall suggestion.
posted by riffraff at 4:33 PM on January 19, 2005