I am still having this issue, and I have not figured out why. I have heard that it could be because of problems with adobe flash player. Does anybody know how I can fix my problem? I am running the most recent versions of both firefox and adobe flash.

I think Adobe might have solved this by now, but there used to be a problem where when you launched a new window using Flash, you would get switched to a different window. The workaround was to disable the protected mode feature of the Flash player plugin. It has security benefits, but seems to have compatibility issues on some systems.

The old instructions were somewhat arduous; fortunately, there is a new hidden setting for this:

(A) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(B) In the search box above the list, type or paste flash and pause while the list is filtered

(C) Double-click the dom.ipc.plugins.flash.disable-protected-mode preference to switch its value from false to true.

This might not take effect until all Flash has been unloaded for a few minutes, or you close Firefox.

Before that preference was added, the way to disable protected mode was by creating or editing a settings file. The following pages/posts provide different approaches for that if it turns out to be necessary (if Flash EXE processes continue to show up in the Windows Task Manager, Processes tab, even after changing the Firefox preference):

• Adobe support article under the heading "Last Resort": Adobe Forums: How do I troubleshoot Flash Player's protected mode for Firefox?

• Manual steps: https://support.mozilla.org/questions/968190?page=5#answer-509209

• Batch file to automate the manual steps: https://support.mozilla.org/questions/982093#answer-518078 (alternate version of Carm's batch file with a few changes by me: https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=f7d304d92388737d&id=F7D304D9238...)

Flash needs to completely unload from memory (exiting and starting Firefox up again might help) before this takes effect.

Any improvement?

I will try this. But what security benefits will I be bypassing? Will it put my computer at a larger risk? The problem seems to happen at random. I can go for a couple of weeks without it happening, but then it will just randomly happen. So I will try that and tell you if it works out. Thanks for the help.

The idea behind protected mode is to separate bits and pieces of Flash content from one another and limit their privileges so they can't do as much damage on your system. If it works, it's a great idea. If it causes problems... not so much.