Ever since Adobe took over Flash there seems to be nothing but problems with it. I had issues with Flash in XP, Vista and Linux. In XP and Vista it would freeze. If I had the screen maximized while watching a video, from Hulu for example, when it froze I would have to reboot the computer the hard way.
In Linux it doesn’t freeze but there are often times the video just goes white… White screen of death? I have to reload the page for it to work, which starts the video from the beginning. This happens most of the time if I have the video playing and I try going to other websites.
I don’t remember this many problems with Flash before Adobe took over. I know there are always going to be issues but what exactly are they doing, or not doing, over at Adobe?!
I am starting to wish Flash would just die and be replaced by something else. It seems to be a security risk as it is, I am tired of seeing flash ads all over the place, especially the ones that yell out “Congratulations You Won” That really annoys the hell out of me. Honestly when I see a flash ad I automatically despise the company and product using it.
I use Noscript in Firefox, which does help, but it isn’t 100%.
Flash is really one of the most ugly pieces of tech I’ve ever seen. It has a horrible performance too. Why would you need ~60% CPU power just to watch a small youtube video for example? It’s horrible, often buggy and often makes browsers crash on specific sites
I recall long before adobe acquired macromedia and flash that every new release of the plugin actually brought performance and feature improvements. I frequented flash video and animation sites long before they became popular, and I always enjoyed trying out a new version of the plugin, and seeing a video or game play better with less CPU usage.
Then adobe came in and sh*t all over everything. >:) I remember thinking, after the first adobe release of flash, that it was a huge step backwards. My old, reliable pentium III struggled with even the smallest, lowest resolution video, whereas before I could have 4 different browser windows open, each with a different video or game playing at the same time.
I stuck with the last macromedia version of flash for as long as possible but eventually I had to “upgrade” (read: downgrade) to the new version a year after the acquisition. Each subsequent version of flash that adobe has released, imo, has been very wishy-washy. Sometimes things get better, other times they get horribly worse, with the latter being more frequent.
I will admint that Linux flash support has more or less improved from where it was two-three years ago, but Windows releases have been consistently bad. I’d say the Windows and Linux flash plugins are about equal in terms of reliability and performance, which is funny since Windows is the “preferred” platform most development is done on.
I had to replace my old PIII (my parents were using it as their main machine) because Web browsing became too much for it to handle because of all of the flash thrown around the Web. If I removed the flash plugin, despite the warning messages I would get, the machine would run just as well as it did when it was new. Unfortunately my parents needed to use some flash applications. I had two choices: buy an expensive video card upgrade for an old, nearly obsolete machine, or build them a new one. I went with the latter since the video card would have only helped marginally, while a new machine would last them longer. I am still amazed that, of all things, flash was the reason I had to replace an otherwise perfectly usable computer.
While flash is a great big stinking pile, i’d double check the paths to where your plugins are stored. Sounds like you have a duplicate of the lib for flash, remove one (or better rename it) and see how well it works.