Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

flashcrash.dempsky.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 90 posts

Re: Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

#81

Post by Groxx »

freebsd_dude wrote: post #58
pyre wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough the "libflashplugin.so" bar popped up on Gmail for me the last time that all my Flash instances crashed. I never realized that GMail used Flash. (The bar only seemed to pop up on tabs that were using Flash, not all tabs had the warning at the top)

Gmail uses flash for the file upload progress bar when adding an attachment. Will HTML5 allow developers to add this feature?

Don't know about HTML5 (I can hope), but it can be accomplished with JS + hidden iframe for uploading. I think it requires querying the server for the progress, but I could be wrong there.

Re: Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

#82

Post by tlrobinson »

ramchip wrote: post #26
m104 wrote: post #3

Much praise to the Google Chrome team for handling this sort of thing gracefully.

And much praise to the Opera team for just not crashing in the first place. I can zoom in the blue square, move around, etc. and the page is still fine after a minute or so leaving it open.

Chrome doesn't crash either, just the plugin in a separate process.

Same with the latest versions of Safari, except it takes down all instances of Flash, even those in other pages, which is obviously inferior.

Re: Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

#83

Post by philwelch »

chrisbolt wrote: post #59
philwelch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but oddly it seems to circumvent Safari's protective spawning of Flash to a separate process when it does load. When I clicked the browser-crashing Flash app, it actually crashed Safari, and Activity Monitor never picks up the separate Flash process anymore.

Are you sure you're not running Safari in 32-bit mode? The separation is only set up when Safari is running in 64-bit. That setup worked fine for me; clicking the plugin loaded it, and a few seconds later it crashed and turned into the block without crashing Safari.

It turns out I was running Safari in 32 bit mode. I have no idea how that got changed, though.

Re: Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

#84

Post by Niten »

ramchip wrote: post #26
m104 wrote: post #3

Much praise to the Google Chrome team for handling this sort of thing gracefully.

And much praise to the Opera team for just not crashing in the first place. I can zoom in the blue square, move around, etc. and the page is still fine after a minute or so leaving it open.

Can anyone enlighten me on this? I noticed the same thing:

* Viewing this page in Firefox 3.6 on Windows caused Flash to crash, taking the browser down with it.

* Viewing it in Chrome on the same machine caused the Flash plugin subprocess to crash, resulting in an error message in Chrome.

* However, no crash occurred in Opera. This despite the fact that 32-bit Opera on Windows does not appear to use isolated subprocesses for running NSAPI plugins.

So what's going on here? Does Opera use some sort of in-process isolation to protect the browser from its plugins? Or is there perhaps some quirk of running in the Opera environment that caused this Flash crash not to be triggered like it was in Firefox and Chrome?

Re: Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

#85

Post by grinich »

philwelch wrote: post #83
chrisbolt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you're not running Safari in 32-bit mode? The separation is only set up when Safari is running in 64-bit. That setup worked fine for me; clicking the plugin loaded it, and a few seconds later it crashed and turned into the block without crashing Safari.

It turns out I was running Safari in 32 bit mode. I have no idea how that got changed, though.

You could have changed it a while back to work with another pluging. For example, video/voice chat for Gmail only works in 32-bit Safari.

Re: Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

#86

Post by jdowdell »

davidu wrote: post #2

If it crashes you: $ lynx --dump http://flashcrash.dempsky.org/ If you are reading this from a browser using Adobe's Flash Player plug-in (i.e., if you see a blue rectangle below), it will probably crash within the next few seconds. :-( [EMBED] "Regarding crashing, I can tell you that we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved i…

Player team update here, 6pm Saturday Pacific: http://blogs.adobe.com/emmy/archives/2010/02/flash_bug_repor...

Re: Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

#87

Post by oconnore »

ramchip wrote: post #26
m104 wrote: post #3

Much praise to the Google Chrome team for handling this sort of thing gracefully.

And much praise to the Opera team for just not crashing in the first place. I can zoom in the blue square, move around, etc. and the page is still fine after a minute or so leaving it open.

Konqueror stays open too!

Re: Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

#88

Post by ubernostrum »

cmelbye wrote: post #74
wehriam wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How recent? 4.0.4 crashed for me.

You need to have at least Snow Leopard, I believe. Apple recently moved plugins to separate processes, which prevents the entire browser from crashing. Flash will crash, but it won't take down the whole browser.

Except IIRC this wasn't about security or stability; it was because they went 64-bit on everything and needed a way to have the 64-bit apps and 32-bit plugins interact sanely.

Re: Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

#89

Post by vimalg2 »

Niten wrote: post #84
ramchip wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And much praise to the Opera team for just not crashing in the first place. I can zoom in the blue square, move around, etc. and the page is still fine after a minute or so leaving it open.

Can anyone enlighten me on this? I noticed the same thing: * Viewing this page in Firefox 3.6 on Windows caused Flash to crash, taking the browser down with it. * Viewing it in Chrome on the same machine caused the Flash plugin subprocess to crash, resulting in an error message in Chrome. * However, no crash occurred in Opera. This despite the fact that 32-bit Opera on Windows does not appear to use isolated subproce…

Adobe Flash on Opera/Linux has always been quirky , crashy and all-round unreliable for me in the past. So, I use Opera as my pure-HTML+javascript browser, with ALL plugins, sound, animation, and Java plugins turned off in Global preferences.

Going off-topic [Opera praise]: These settings instantly turn Opera into the most stable and shockingly scalable 'Research and reference' browser I've used. I only use Firefox3.5.x solely for web-dev, Google Apps, heavy-JS Web 2.0 apps, and Flash-enabled sites of course (with Flashblock as first-line-defence).

Post reply on HN