Crashes or other problems with certain multimedia content in Firefox (such as Youtube videos and Flash animations or games) can often be resolved by performing the steps in these Knowledge Base articles:

• Flash Plugin - Keep it up to date and troubleshoot problems

• Adobe Flash plugin has crashed - Prevent it from happening again

• Flash 11.3 doesn't load video in Firefox

On Windows Vista and above, you can disable Flash protected mode by following the instructions on these pages:

• http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1018071#TemporaryWorkaround
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Flash#Disabling_Protected_Mode_in_Flash_11.3

(See this Adobe blog post for technical details about Flash protected mode.)

For recent updates for Adobe Shockwave Flash, please update your version to 14. Please refer to the security updates and Adobe Security Bulletin for more information.

Please tell us if this helped! -Ryanbart

Thanks Ryan.

Making sure I had the most recent plugins was the first thing I did when FF kept freezing up recently because of flash hanging. If I disable Flash HA how does this affect the performance of videos that do not play in full screen mode. Will they be choppy?

it really depends on what website you are on. If it is YouTube then yes you can disable flash and it will automatically change to HTML5 video. But I am not sure about other websites.

-Ryanbart

Hi teckwitt, browsers use the disk cache to cut down waiting time for requests from the web. If you have a very high speed connection, you might not notice a difference.

(Sometimes clearing the cache will itself resolve issues with websites not working properly.)

Firefox 32 has an overhauled caching component. If caching is related to the Flash plugin crashing, you may have uncovered a bug in this newer part of the software. I'm not clear on how Firefox uses the cache for Flash media (which often is sent in a stream and not allowed to be cached), so I don't immediately see the connection.