The Daily FlashFuckups



  • So I updated the Flash Player, because what are you going to do to get rid of that irritating popup that's trying to get you to? And I don't know which version exactly is it right now (I stopped paying attention to that since they started using the stupid version numbers like 11.4.2983 or whatever), and since I've done that:


    1. almost any flash video is practically unwatchable in Firefox, as it stutters regularly - 5 seconds fluent, freezes for a second to 3, 5 seconds fluent, etc...
    2. Anytime the flash plugin loads it slows down FF to a ...not really a crawl, so let's call it "leisurely walk"
    3. If the flash plugin gets focus, it won't properly return it to the browser when I click outside of the plugin, I assume, because since that happens FF refuses to scroll when I use mouse wheel OR arrow keys, until I reload the page
    4. It freezes and crashes at least twice a day, and I mean really freezes - I'm watching a video on fulscreen, suddenly the picture stops, the video doesn't react to Esc (which should restore it to not fullscreen mode), doesn't react to alt+tab a clicking the X in the aero preview of the "Flash fullscreen window" that's in the taskbar, only way to get rid of it is stop the process in task manager, effectively crashing ALL the flash embeds in ALL the tabs in ALL the Firefox(es?)...

    And this was a minor update, from version like 11.3.2293 to 11.3.2294* or something similar. The previous minor version ran no problem. How the hell can you fuck up a minor update like that? Oh, yes, Adobe, I almost forgot. I miss the good old days when Flash was done by Macromedia which actually knew and cared what it was doing with it...


    *not the real version numbers, as I said, I stopped caring about that when it ceased to matter and be versioned in a way one could actually remember without actively trying to learn it.



  •  Normally I'd go and check what version I have, see if I can replicate this, etc etc, but Flash with its whiny updates has long ago exhausted the amount of attention I can be arsed to spare on any one program on my machine.



  • TRWTF is that you apparently still trusted Flash. What a piece of cr*p it is. On a mac, it already managed to consume 100% of a core for a single YouTube video, but after the last update it reaches 1.5 core (i7). Yes, it is somehow multithreaded and almost maxes out 2 cpus. And the performance is terrible: stuttering, unreliable menus, stopping when the buffer is completely full, etc.

    Google does it better. So, Adobe should do the right thing and stop using version numbers. Instead they should call it Flash Grandiose Phyrric Lace Sausage, and we'll all be frenzied about the next update, Flash Debauched Broccoli Impunity.



  • @TGV said:

    TRWTF is that you apparently still trusted Flash.

    I don't for some time already. I was actually pretty surprised when the previous update worked relatively well, but I was writing this one as a "they're back to shittyland again" general rant. Hence the "The Daily" in the forum title.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    So I updated the Flash Player, because what are you going to do to get rid of that irritating popup that's trying to get you to? And I don't know which version exactly is it right now (I stopped paying attention to that since they started using the stupid version numbers like 11.4.2983 or whatever)

    I thought the big recent change wasn't so much about Flash itself but that Firefox now sandboxes it.



  • @barfoo said:

    Firefox now sandboxes it.
     

    That's a bit weird, Firefox has sandboxed Flash for quite a while now (plugincontainer.exe), and it's only started crashing on Vista for me with the 11.3 update and only Firefox 13. On XP it's good, on FFX12 it's good, and with non-11.3 it's good.



  • @TGV said:

    Yes, it is somehow multithreaded and almost maxes out 2 cpus.

    Last year I've seen a single VB6 application maxing out the 4 cores of each of the 4 XEON cpu on a big server. It was installed as a Windows service and was trying to send out faxes. Lots of them.



  • If I understand this correctly, Flash now updates itself automatically – saves non-admin users from being harrassed constantly.

    I was musing the other day, not for the first time, what does it do when your browser is open when it wants to update? The last two nights, the Adobe Flash Player Update Service has spontaneously crashed – I just get a crash dialog appear for it unexpectedly. Gone midnight last night, around half ten tonight. Seriously, Adobe think I’m going to be in bed at half ten? And when I do sleep, I hibernate the computer, so Firefox is made to run until near death before I allow it to be restarted.

    I also have Firefox start on login, so Flash updates for me are rare. The annoying thing with Flashblock is that you can't tell it to always allow Flash from specific servers. For example, if I allow Flash on YouTube, it goes by the page address, not the address hosting the SWF, limiting its effectiveness against infected ad servers. (Though all the infections I've seen in a long time have been due to Java, not Flash or Adobe Reader.)



  • @dhromed said:

    That's a bit weird, Firefox has sandboxed Flash for quite a while now (plugincontainer.exe), and it's only started crashing on Vista for me with the 11.3 update and only Firefox 13. On XP it's good, on FFX12 it's good, and with non-11.3 it's good.
    There's a known issue with Flash 11.3 being an ass with Firefox... I have issues with it crashing at times, and I'm on Firefox 10.0.5esr\Flash 11.3.



  • @Douglasac said:

    There's a known issue with Flash 11.3 being an ass with Firefox... I have issues with it crashing at times, and I'm on Firefox 10.0.5esr\Flash 11.3.
     

    I have it stuttering here (Flash11.3.300, FF12 - WTF... FF won't allow text in the plugin box to be selected!), doesn't play Youtube videos smoothly.

    Only started happenning when I updated the video drivers to attempt to gain HD playback on this netbook, but that failed. I just presumed the two were linked.



  • @Speakerphone Dude said:

    @TGV said:

    Yes, it is somehow multithreaded and almost maxes out 2 cpus.

    Last year I've seen a single VB6 application maxing out the 4 cores of each of the 4 XEON cpu on a big server. It was installed as a Windows service and was trying to send out faxes. Lots of them.

    You can do multithreading with VB6.



  •  Update:

    When I started my computer today, one of the first things I got was this:

     

    ...nice, maybe Adobe programmers read TDWTF in their work time?
    Anyways, I'm going to give them a chance (not much hope though), and see. Now if only all of their update install windows weren't fixed as topmost (I guess I should just be glad they're not modal).

     

    Extra WTF: registration is now mandatory on imageshack? As in "we're gonna display 'modal' html 'popup div' (you know what I mean) with overlay div blocking access to the image address textareas"? Fuck you, I've got Firebug. But I guess I should be thankful for their stupidity, otherwise I'd have to search for another image hosting service, which I'm too lazy to do.



  • @Jaime said:

    @Speakerphone Dude said:
    @TGV said:

    Yes, it is somehow multithreaded and almost maxes out 2 cpus.

    Last year I've seen a single VB6 application maxing out the 4 cores of each of the 4 XEON cpu on a big server. It was installed as a Windows service and was trying to send out faxes. Lots of them.

    You can do multithreading with VB6.

     

     I don't want to be rude or disrespectful, but do you guys really mean this seriously? I thought it's pretty natural that you can do multithreading with everything that can import functions from external (WIN) libraries, as it's ultimately the OS (functions) that provide this functionality. Which means for example that you can also do a multithreaded Excel/Word macro too.*

     

    which I'm mentioning mainly because the idea seems pretty funny*

     

    **by funny I naturally mean batshit crazy, disgusting and horrible, offcourse. But it would make me laugh if I came across it anywhere. And then cry and kill myself - while still laughing.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    Which means for example that you can also do a multithreaded Excel/Word macro too

    You are hereby challenged to present the code for a multithreaded Excel macro. If it can be done, it must be done. That's how progress work.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    I don't want to be rude or disrespectful, but do you guys really mean this seriously? I thought it's pretty natural that you can do multithreading with everything that can import functions from external (WIN) libraries, as it's ultimately the OS (functions) that provide this functionality. Which means for example that you can also do a multithreaded Excel/Word macro too.*

     

    *which I'm mentioning mainly because the idea seems pretty funny**

     

    **by funny I naturally mean batshit crazy, disgusting and horrible, offcourse. But it would make me laugh if I came across it anywhere. And then cry and kill myself - while still laughing.

     

    You are being pretty disrespectful (is that even a word?) by suggesting we're being serious, but I had not yet overcome the Shock (haha, another great Adobe product) that Flash could use more than a single thread. Sofar it hadn't, not on the mac at least. And then it uses it to take up two cores! And still perform badly.

    Anyway, I challenge you to implement a multithreaded Excel macro, and not crash the whole app...



  • I'd got used to Flash being unstable on my Ubuntu box, like changing the tab in FF crashing the flash player, but the latest update(s) on my Win7 laptop have buggered that too. I have redraw problems on youtube videos when I scroll the page,as well as the player crashing at really random intervals. Has the Adobe flash dev team been infiltrated by an Apple sleeper cell or was Steve Jobs actually right?



  • @Douglasac said:

    @dhromed said:
    That's a bit weird, Firefox has sandboxed Flash for quite a while now (plugincontainer.exe), and it's only started crashing on Vista for me with the 11.3 update and only Firefox 13. On XP it's good, on FFX12 it's good, and with non-11.3 it's good.
    There's a known issue with Flash 11.3 being an ass with Firefox... I have issues with it crashing at times, and I'm on Firefox 10.0.5esr\Flash 11.3.
     

    Oh, fun detail: on XP+FFX13, the updater constantly crashes but the player is good.

     

     



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    So I updated the Flash Player, because what are you going to do to get rid of that irritating popup that's trying to get you to? And I don't know which version exactly is it right now (I stopped paying attention to that since they started using the stupid version numbers like 11.4.2983 or whatever), and since I've done that:

    Had something similar myself, noticed flash videos just completely stopped working altogether in FF after an update. Cleaned it out and installed it again, no change, it just plain doesn't work in FF anymore. I just put Chrome on the box and carried on.

     



  •  ... oh and regarding the updater. On my Win7 box at home it constantly crashes explorer, at first I was all "Why does explorer keep hanging and restarting?" until I logged in as admin and noticed that with full rights, a flash update pops up and explorer is fine. It only has problems when I'm logged in as a regular user, which of course 90% of the time I am. It seems like it wants to get elevated, and the UAC box probably /should/ pop up but for some reason it doesn't and it just kills explorer.

     



  • Rendering vector graphics is a tough job, so multi threading is a good thing. I recall the first time they started using it. I got a like 50 % framerate improvement.

    As for video rendering, uhm, I blame driver incompatibilities. Adobe really is trying to do the right thing and offload as much as possible to the GPU. That's difficult to get right on every single PC in the world.



  • @dhromed said:

    Vista

    Found your problem.



  • @henke37 said:

    Rendering vector graphics is a tough job...
     

    What? My 8MHz 68000 could do that, and quite fast too. I'm sure a 2.4GHz i7 should have got no trouble whatsoever rendering a few vectors.

    Anyway, my problem was with YouTube, not the world's premier site in vector art.



  • @db2 said:

    @dhromed said:
    Vista

    Found your problem.

     

    AHAHAHAHAHAH oh.



  • @Douglasac said:

    There's a known issue with Flash 11.3 being an ass with Firefox...
    I've got Flash 11.3 running on Firefox 13 right now and it seems fine to me.  I can't remember every having a problem with Flash.  Now Java on the other hand.  Holy Shit.  Yesterday I made the mistake of updating to the latest and it crashed Firefox every time I tried to access the one web page I need Java for.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    I've got Flash 11.3 running on Firefox 13 right now and it seems fine to me.

    It's a priviliges issue. OS is significant.

     


  • BINNED

    @JimLahey said:

    I'd got used to Flash being unstable on my Ubuntu box, like changing the tab in FF crashing the flash player, but the latest update(s) on my Win7 laptop have buggered that too. I have redraw problems on youtube videos when I scroll the page,as well as the player crashing at really random intervals. Has the Adobe flash dev team been infiltrated by an Apple sleeper cell or was Steve Jobs actually right?

    At least you only got the regular instability issues only on your Linux box.

    I had to remove the 64bit version of Flash and switch back to 32bit because it would crash every single time when loading a video. Oh, it rendered the player fine, but as soon as I clicked play and it started loading content it crashed on any site, in any browser, without fail.

    And that was after I had to hack some hardware accelleration variable (no idea what it does, nor do I care to know) to prevent every video from being invaded by Smurfs (everything had an extra green hue to it effectively turning everyone's faces blue). This has something to do with NVidia's binary drivers, and I did have problems with that in SMplayer like 2 years ago, but it's been long since fixed. Leave it to Adobe to SOMEHOW ressurect the bug I guess.

    INB4 "Can you play a fullscreen Flash video on Linux" - on my old laptop I usually use for web stuff, no, except for Youtube which is apparently the only site that has a competent player which doesn't cause my CPU to go beserk. Downloading the video itself and playing it in anything else works perfectly.



  • @dhromed said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    I've got Flash 11.3 running on Firefox 13 right now and it seems fine to me.

    It's a priviliges issue. OS is significant.

     

    Oh.

    The underpriviliged.

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @dhromed said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    I've got Flash 11.3 running on Firefox 13 right now and it seems fine to me.

    It's a priviliges issue. OS is significant.

    Oh.

    The underpriviliged.

     

    It's an middle- and upper class problem.

    The XP plebs don't have it.

     


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    registration is now mandatory on imageshack? As in "we're gonna display 'modal' html 'popup div' (you know what I mean) with overlay div blocking access to the image address textareas"? Fuck you, I've got Firebug. But I guess I should be thankful for their stupidity, otherwise I'd have to search for another image hosting service, which I'm too lazy to do.
     

    The current least-evil replacement seems to be http://imgur.com/



  • Jesus shit just pay for hosting you cheap fucks. Hell, use Amazon S3 or DropBox, you probably already pay for one of them. You cheap fucks.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Jesus shit just pay for hosting you cheap fucks. Hell, use Amazon S3 or DropBox, you probably already pay for one of them. You cheap fucks.

    Why?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Jesus shit just pay for hosting you cheap fucks. Hell, use Amazon S3 or DropBox, you probably already pay for one of them. You cheap fucks.

    For me it's not a matter of money. When I upload pictures on this forum I use tinypic.com because :

    • it's anonymous
    • I don't want to disrupt the hosting services where I put up my work or personal stuff because my posts are so immensely popular (I fear the Slashdot effect when people send links to each other)
    • I'd rather not mistakenly overwrite my collection of Siegfield and Roy pictures


  • @Speakerphone Dude said:

    (I fear the Slashdot effect
     

    I host my sig banner on my own paid webspace.

    I can assure you neither one of us is that popular.



  • @Speakerphone Dude said:

    I'd rather not mistakenly overwrite my collection of Siegfield and Roy pictures

    Pre or Post tiger attack?



  • @dhromed said:

    I host my sig banner on my own paid webspace.

    What the hell have you done to those poor turtles?



  • @JimLahey said:

    I have redraw problems on youtube videos when I scroll the page,as well as the player crashing at really random intervals.

    I sort of fixed the former by turning off pixel scrolling (a.k.a. 'smooth scrolling'). It still happens occasionally, but far less. The latter is likely an incompatibility with Firefox's out-of-process plugin container and the new sandbox environment used by FP 11.3.

    Let's face it; Adobe's developers can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag. There are reverse engineered unofficial compilers for ActionScript 3 and whole third-party low-level drawing APIs that manage to produce more performant code than the official ones, atleast until the whole Stage3D thing came up with FP11 (overdue by years, I might add). It's not just the browser integration that's half-assed; it's the entire Flash system from back to front, starting at the compiler, continuing into the platform APIs and ending at the runtime environment. It's freaking preposterous and a living testament to the fact that crap software can survive anywhere, including on the distributed personal computers and mobile devices of billions of consumers.



  • @dhromed said:

    I host my sig banner on my own paid webspace.

    I can assure you neither one of us is that popular.

    Well thank you for sharing that, one thing leading to another I ended up on Google Street View being horrified by the terrible landscaping job in front of your house. Tell me - did you do it yourself, or did you use Brian Boer, the dude with a landscaping business that lives 400 meters from your home (on Minnewei)?

    See, no need to be popular to be stalked! (btw most decent webhosts offer a domain privacy service to prevent people from sending you unwanted gifts by fedex).



  • @Someone You Know said:

    What the hell have you done to those poor turtles?
     

    Consumed by chaos.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    registration is now mandatory on imageshack? As in "we're gonna display 'modal' html 'popup div' (you know what I mean) with overlay div blocking access to the image address textareas"? Fuck you, I've got Firebug. But I guess I should be thankful for their stupidity, otherwise I'd have to search for another image hosting service, which I'm too lazy to do.
     

    The current least-evil replacement seems to be http://imgur.com/

     

    found that yesterday by accident, but I think I'll stick with imgshack. I enjoy fucking over certain sites that think their service is so important that I'd be willing to register for it, AND they can't even correctly implement the mechanism that is trying to force me to do that.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Jesus shit just pay for hosting you cheap fucks. Hell, use Amazon S3 or DropBox, you probably already pay for one of them. You cheap fucks.
     

    I had my own site once. Then the owner of a site mine was made to replace his when he took it down noticed it and probably got angry that people are not mourning upon the loss of his "irreplacable piece of ingenuity", and revived it. And people being people, they migrated back to the one they were used to, so mine slowly died out. Since then, I'm an interwebs squatter.

    (Al)so, I'm not really even your averagely successful IT guy*, and paying monthly for a hosting only to "not be a cheap fuck" when I embed images somewhere, is not exactly viable for me.

    Yes, the story of my life is a sad, sad one.

     

    *if you imagine me as the stereotypical basement programmer, you'd be pretty close, except I don't have the posh luxury of a whole basement, just my room in parent's flat.
    As I said, my life is a sad, sad story.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    Yes, the story of my life is a sad, sad one.

    This should be your new avatar:


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