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Flash Crash (Warning, may crash your browser)

flashcrash.dempsky.org

41–50 of 90 posts

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

#42
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering it's still occurring in the most recent release of Flash Player 10, I'd say it's nothing like pointing out IE6 bugs at all. If they had actually fixed that bug in the Flash plugin and people were using older versions, then you might have a point.

The bug has to do with loading 5+ year old Flash 7/8 swfs. A better analogy would be he's making a stink about a Carbon bug for obsolete OS 8/9 apps. Carbon still ships with OSX and serves the same purpose as AVM1 in Flash Player: basic (but not perfect) backwards-compatibility for legacy code.

I'm surprised that more priority hasn't been put into fixing it though. A bug that crashes the browser out in the wild for a year and a half? Someone malicious could do some pretty obnoxious things with it.

Incidentally this use case isn't completely unheard of. There is still a lot of AS2 content out there that companies haven't bothered to migrate to AS3 yet (for whatever reason).

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

#45
post #16

On Snow Leopard and Safari, the browser doesn't crash, but the Flash player crashes.

It's crashing for me with Snow Leopard 10.5.2 on a Core Duo (32 bit obviously) and Safari Version: 4.0.4 (6531.21.10) Build Info: WebBrowser-65312110~2 Code Type: X86 (Native) Parent Process: launchd [157]

PlugIn Path: /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player.plugin/Contents/MacOS/Flash Player PlugIn Identifier: com.macromedia.Flash Player.plugin PlugIn Version: 10.0.42 (1.0.4f348472)

Date/Time: 2010-02-05 22:06:52.926 -0800 OS Version: Mac OS X 10.6.2 (10C540)

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

#47
post #36
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe's CTO claimed that they don't ship versions of Flash that are known to crash. The bug this triggers is more than a year old and the only versions it does not crash is the most recent _beta_ version of Flash. The post merely points out the deception in Lynch's claims.

I updated my post to explain why the bug is irrelevant.

Anything, including corrupt files, that can crash it is relevant because it is also a security vulnerability.

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

#48
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It handles it less gracefully than I would have assumed. If you are running flash in multiple Chrome windows, this will corrupt ALL of them, instead of just the one visiting the page linked above. Wasnt one of Chrome's huge selling features the idea of memory independence?

Memory independence + plugin that isn't designed to run multiple processes = plugin that can only run in one process. Imagine if Flash, forced into running twice, tried to read and write from the same cookie / any other kind of data, without any concurrency tools of any kind. Chrome has to run Flash how Flash wants to be run, because doing otherwise could cause massive problems with any plugin. This is part of why it…

This sounds a bit fishy to me. Of course Flash can be run from multiple processes simultaneously since it naturally runs inside of multiple browsers simultaneously, and I assume Chrome has some internal (socket based?) IPC that they're using anyway...

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

#50
Why are Flash's bugs only a problem when when Steve Jobs mentions it? Is Flash really a problem or are we just overcome by Job's reality distortion field?

Flash does stuff that HTML cannot currently do. In this respect hackers should thank Adobe as Flash helped move applications off the desktop and onto the web. When HTML5 has matured, the gaps in HTML will be filled and unless Flash has something new to offer, it will be time for give it a heartfelt goodbye.

Adobe's saving grace is that it released FABridge - you can use Flash for things its good at Ajax for everything else. Then when HTML5 has matured you wont have to rewrite everything.

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