Adobe’s Flash plugin for Firefox has never offered the kind of quality performance that the equivalent plugin for Internet Explorer has but at least it handled most Flash based video fairly well. However, somewhere around the 14th of April the nightly builds of Firefox 3 began to seize up on websites that incorporated any sort of Flash based media at all be it video, images or advertisements. Sites that I had been able to view previously would lock up the browser completely and only a “Kill Process” via the Windows XP Task Manager would stop the CPU from having conniption fits about being maxed out at 99%.
This was annoying to say the least and more than troubling. What had been a consistently rock stable, memory friendly new version of Firefox was now no longer able to handle Flash based media? Off to the forums I go along with several other testers and early adopters as I found out when I got there.
Strangely enough I had had the presence of mind to test these sites using Opera 9.5 beta which I keep around for testing website rendering issues between browsers and all the sites that were killing the nightly builds were showing fine in Opera. Since Opera and Firefox use the same plugin this told me that something had changed in the nightly builds that was causing this problem. And since I’m not familiar with programming (yet, can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Watch me), it was up to convincing the Dev’s that this was indeed a serious problem.
I’ve got to hand it to the developers at Mozilla, the problem had been filed on 4/20/08 as a new bug, verified and confirmed and set as blocking Gecko 1.9 meaning Firefox 3. After only a couple days of digging around the code base of the latest nightly builds the developers at large found the problem and had it solved as of yesterday’s update for Minefield (name for any developer’s build of Firefox). Just a bit impressive if you ask me.
Certain types of Flash based media still comes up choppy and dropping frames as usual but that’s more due to the inherent problems of the Flash plugin for Firefox and Opera than anything browser related. I’m just glad that Firefox 3 is back to being a class act.
And kudos to the Dev’s at Mozilla. Nice work folks!
Can you help here? With FF3 installed and no Adblock or anything else, can’t bring up any flash video at all. Can’t for the life of me think what’s wrong. Seems to be widespread… respond to email please if you can help!
Neo,
On it’s way.
For the record, you can no longer install the Flash plugin via the Firefox prompt to do so (blame Adobe for that one). You have to download it using Firefox directly from the Adobe website.
Should work fine.
Thanks Kirk,
I’ll try that. I should have said that in XP it seems to work fine but the problem is in Linux Ubuntu. Example: on the new search engine ixquick.com type in cars (for example) and hit videos. In XP it displays some nice moving vids of cars. In Linux on the other hand it has blank spaces with ‘Flash required’ written where the vids should be. As far as I know (as verified by adobe on their site) I have flash installed in both XP and Linux Ubuntu (FF in both). Strange eh? Any further advice appreciated, but will try your previous idea too.
Neo
Hope it works out, Neo. When I get some time I’ll check a few things out myself.
Fixed? I don’t think so.
I can view certain videos at youtube.com in IE with no problems, but
the same clips freeze FF, and I have to kill and restart.
Hi Gerry,
I agree, I get the exact same thing but as I touched on in this post and elaborated in the follow up post, the problem now lies in Adobe’s side of the court. Adobe themselves admitted to the fact the Firefox/Opera version of the Flash plugin is nowhere near the quality and as streamlined as the version for Internet Explorer. Why waste time, money and the man-hours on streamlining a Flash plugin for two browsers that have so little percentage of the market place? But now that Firefox commands nearly 20% of the US market (browsers) and global usage is between 40% to 50%, it’s time Adobe came around don’t you think?
My suggestion is to read that follow up post and add your two cents worth via the link to the feedback form. It certainly can’t hurt any.
And many thanks for your feedback!
I am not exactly a fan of explorer, but if people keep exagerating the statistics of how many people use firefox, then nobody will believe us anymore. I understand the excitement regarding this subject and how tempting it is to just choose the one you want to see, but the statistics average much lower than 20 percent in the U.S. and 50 percent in Europe… though the Europe ones are probably closer than the U.S. stats. None-the-less, it would be nice if everyone got together and fixed this issue.
Hey Rudy, (welcome to GMG)
Yup, I understand what you say about not being a fan of IE as I’m even worse. I’m not a fan of anything. I only use what works for me for the task at hand at the time. Anyway…
Actually I did quite a bit of research before I stated those usage figures although I should have used the term “global” usage instead of saying “Europe and the Far East” in my last comment and after checking again I would have to edit global usage to between 40% to 50%. I shall edit accordingly and thanks for the heads up about that but I wasn’t too far off and pretty much right on for the usage in the states:
The stats for Firefox usage in the USA is 19.22% according to the latest figures by Net Applications and these guys aren’t in the habit of showing favoritism to one browser over another.
The best stats for current global browser use of Firefox is 42.6% (for the month of July 2008) according W3C Schools.
Acknowledging what you said about statistics varying widely, I do have to agree with you up to a point and even the above sites state that as well. Be that as it may, I hardly exaggerated the percentages above against any I had already seen stated in any other posts or articles I had read during my research whether written professionally or otherwise. My implied point here was simply that Firefox is hardly the new kid on the block or a minor player any longer so don’t just throw it some scraps off the table while IE gets the best cut. If a company like Adobe is going to provide a Flash plugin for Firefox (and Opera) there’s no excuse for not putting in the same time, effort and quality into it as they did for the IE version. Do it right or don’t even bother.
hi,
maybe you can help me..
i’ve installed the ff3 on a fedora 8 and the browser can’t seem to load the flash plugin, even though i’ve installed it.
any ideas?
Unfortunately I still have this problem with Firefox 3 and Vista. Something else is going on here. I have read many forums and seen a few different fixes (one forum unfortunately had people turning off java and javascript).
It’s unfortunate that Firefox has become such a pain. I rely on it heavily.
If you open up too many tabs then embedded flash seems to hang at 2 seconds. Perhaps a memory addressing issue, who knows.
Bottom line is that my customers are complaining and Firefox without embedded flash is just a waste of drive space.