Shockwave Flash crash takes out Firefox

If like me you see the problem with Adobe's Flash format and how it diverts us away from the openness of the interweb market which has facilitated so much progress you'll see the bugs in Adobe's software as just another problem in their strategy.

Today I needed to use a computer in an office running Windows, at least it was Firefox, but Adobe Flash still managed to bring it down with a crash!It's fully reproducible from this page, linked from this other page with Firefox 2.0.13 and Shockwave Flash 9.0 r60, DLL v9.0.60.184 backtrace:

NPSWF32! 3000d6fa()
NPSWF32! 300d106d()
NPSWF32! 300d343e()
NPSWF32! 300e580e()
NPSWF32! 300e5a22()

3000D6FA   mov         ecx,dword ptr [eax+1Ch] <--Crash
3000D6FD   call        3000D705
3000D702   ret         4

I have plugins installed:

Shockwave Flash

File name: NPSWF32.dll
Shockwave Flash 9.0 r60

MetaFrame Secure Access Manager

File name: npCtxCAO.dll
Endpoint Analysis Client

VLC Multimedia Plugin

File name: npvlc.dll
Version 0.8.6c, copyright 1996-2006 The VideoLAN Team

http://www.videolan.org/

I've posted here as they don't provide any email address for bug reports, and they've never replied to any other communication I've sent about crash bugs in their propreitary software. Will they ever fix this? Not sure when they have loads of other exploits and privacy issues (secret cookies which ignore browser settings etc)

Flakey GNU Flash (Gnash) causes Firefox to hang

I'm running the latest Kubuntu 7.10 which comes with Firefox 2 and through I would see what all the fuss is about with Gnash (aka GNU Flash). Gnash is the GNU/FSF branded project to implement decoding support of Adobe's Proprietary Flash file format that is sadly so common on the net these days (seems contrary to the No MS-Word documents strategy you're probably thinking too?)

Anyway I followed the instructions:

apt-get install mozilla-plugin-gnash

Gnash installed ok, so I headed over to youTube to hear a new track by a band I heard on the radio earlier. I hadn't' thought to save my draft email in another tab.. pretty risky this software stuff.. My laptop started chugging and churning, I ran "top" and could see gtk-gnash was using 1.6% of RAM in its two process threads, and 20% CPU in one process and 79% in the other one! This went on for 5 mins before I managed to close the tab (after several warnings from Firefox about a script which had stopped responding). There were no errors reported, and the clip never worked. I did get a glimpse of the spinning loading icon youTube uses though, before it all went grey.

Bizarrely, there is a context menu item in Gnash (from within the browser) where you can "Quit".. so I did this and it went down to one process taking up 80% of CPU time!

So it looks like.. unfortunately for the Gnash developers.. that the implementation is presently as flaky ass the GNU+FSF strategy to support Adobe is.