What is your experience with Flash in the latest versions of Firefox?

Megalith

Megalith

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Flash acts like complete shit on my end. I have found that most videos drag my browser down and reduce the response time by many seconds, and right clicking on others will stall or freeze the browser completely. Anyone else?
 
No issues here, Firefox ESR Portable 38.3.0 (same installation in the same folder that's been upgraded since v4 came out, literally). I just did a fresh Windows 7 install a few days ago but since my Firefox is portable and has been for many years now it's easy to just move it around as required. Installed the latest Flash player plugin (19.0.0.226) on Tuesday and haven't noticed any problems with YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, or any other video related activities so far.

Considering how "old" my Firefox installation is and that it's been upgraded over and over again for so long and the fact that I have 26 addons/extensions and 9 plugins loaded, it's pretty amazing that it still loads in about 3 seconds flat from a cold start on a machine with a 7200 rpm hard drive.

Guess I'm just one of the fortunate ones: never had the so-called memory leaks that so many other people complain of, never had crashing issues like others do (the Health Report shows the last actual crash was in March 2013), don't have freezing/lockups like others do - which is one reason for the whole "multi-process" crap they're working on or so they say. I just don't have any problems with Firefox like I keep reading about that so many others report. I can load up 30+ tabs with various content of all kinds and not have any issues. I have 41 sites on my Bookmarks Toolbar and I can open Firefox fresh and then load all of those tabs simultaneously (give or take a few) in about 30 seconds and the RAM usage barely peaks at 700MB after it starts to idle with those 41 tabs loaded.

I have it configured precisely how I want which is why I won't be upgrading to version 39 or anything past it - Mozilla is making too many alterations to Firefox that I don't agree with and have no use for so, I'll stick with Firefox ESR 38.x till they get to ESR 45 and then I'll just have to decide what to do at that point.

Firefox, there is no substitute - at least for me.
 
Latest version of Firefox (41.0.2) and Flash (19.whatever) on both Mac OS X and Windows 7: no problems at all now, never had any. I do have "Enable hardware acceleration" turned off in Flash's "Settings..."; I'm not sure who benefits from that and Adobe shouldn't have made that on by default.

Firefox Health Report tells me the last time Firefox crashed was in May. I don't remember it; it happens so rarely that I usually just assume the page I was trying to visit was badly broken or malformed during transmission.

Are you running any plugins that enable downloading Flash videos? Those are such glaringly obvious suspects for problems with Flash that I probably shouldn't even be asking.
 
I also have Firefox 41.0.2 with the latest version of flash. I haven't had issues in a long time.
 
FF 41.0.2, Flash 19.0.0.226.

I have to say, your post actually made me realize that things have been working quite smooth the last 3 weeks or so.
It went from having to constantly kill it via task manager to stable and not grinding to a halt every few minutes.
So yeah, knock on wood - something got fixed. Thank you, anonymous fixer.
 
evilsofa said:
Latest version of Firefox (41.0.2) and Flash (19.whatever) on both Mac OS X and Windows 7: no problems at all now, never had any. I do have "Enable hardware acceleration" turned off in Flash's "Settings..."; I'm not sure who benefits from that and Adobe shouldn't have made that on by default.
Click to expand...

The benefit is better overall performance and potentially better battery life because it offloads the decoding of the content from the CPU (which is dreadfully inefficient by comparison on both functional and power levels) to the GPU (which is really efficient in terms of code execution and power usage) on said devices. Watching a Flash video on YouTube or many other sites without the hardware acceleration results in higher CPU usage which translates into increased power consumption overall in situations where the hardware acceleration being enabled would kick in the GPU.

With HTML5 moving in and YouTube and other sites now shifting away from Flash, I suspect that in a few years we won't have it anymore in any amount that matters, but we're not there just yet.
 
With Flash hemorrhaging vulnerabilities on a continual basis, I have completely removed it from Firefox. I use Firefox for my primary surfing habits, and seldom run into a surfing situation where operating without Flash hinders me.

On the rare occasion that I absolutely need to view Flash content, I'll open the specific link in Chrome, where I've neutered Flash to a 'Click-to-Play' state.
 
On Windows 10 it's been a pain in the ass. Many lock ups and stop script errors. I try to avoid it but there are a couple sites I frequent that require Flash.
 
So I'm convinced that the problem is Windows 10 related, since Flash performs horribly even if I run the browser in safe mode or start Firefox with a brand new profile. I don't understand what the OS has to do with it, though, since Flash seems to run fine in Chrome.
 
Megalith said:
So I'm convinced that the problem is Windows 10 related, since Flash performs horribly even if I run the browser in safe mode or start Firefox with a brand new profile. I don't understand what the OS has to do with it, though, since Flash seems to run fine in Chrome.
Click to expand...

Because on Windows 10 Flash is something that's integrated OS wide whereas with Chrome it's just using its own internal plugin (which I think is based on PepperFlash iirc). They get the same tasks done but in terms of performance there's a vast difference.
 
Firefox it's fine

On Opera 33(which is now based on chromium) is completely broken.
 
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