Adobe’s Flash plug-in has grown more robust over time, but it’s still one of the major causes of instability in Firefox. You could always avoid sites containing Flash content, but that’s not exactly practical. Instead, you can try and minimise where things can go wrong by tweaking your browser’s settings and performing maintenance on your system.
Firstly, you can make sure you’re running the most recent version of Flash via Plugin Check, a service provided by Mozilla that streamlines the update process. Your next step should then be to set Flash to “Ask to Activate”, which prevents Flash content from running until you click on it.
Along with these suggestions, gHack’s Martin Brinkmann recommends using two browsers, with one set up for Flash content and the other regular web activities, though this can be problematic as it’s not always easy to tell if a site is using Flash. You can also disable hardware acceleration and protected mode, though the latter should be a last resort.
Brinkmann offers a few more tips, which you can read in full over at gHacks.
Simple solutions to fix Flash crashes when using Firefox [gHacks]
Comments
2 responses to “Make Firefox Less Likely To Crash Or Freeze From Flash Content”
Your next step should then be to set Flash to “Ask to Activate”, which prevents Flash content from running until you click on it.
This is excellent advice.
I use mainly the Chrome browser, but useFlashBlock for both browsers.
I installed a flash blocker addon for Firefox which isn’t bad it has a list of exceptions as well so you can say always play content from YouTube etc. Flash has been bad with virtually all browsers. Up until windows8 I used to use IE because it handled flash better.