Flash 10 Released - Finally, Flash Videos In Firefox Work Again!
Today Abode announced the availability of Adobe Flash Player 10 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new plugin offers a number of improvements such as native support for 3D, a new text rendering engine, and integration with Adobe's Pixel Bender technology. However, we know that many of you aren't interested in these upgrades, which are mainly aimed at Flash developers. What you want to know is this: Will Flash video finally work in Firefox?
We're pleased to report the answer to that question is YES. After installing the new player, we loaded up a bunch of tabs in Firefox and played a YouTube video. The video played to completion. It worked!
The Firefox 3/Flash Bug
If you don't have any idea what we're talking about here, consider yourself lucky. The Flash/Firefox bug has been a major source of aggravation for many users running Firefox 3 on Windows XP or Vista. When viewing an embedded video on a web site like YouTube, the videos would start playing, but they would stop after only a couple of seconds. There was nothing you could do to fix it except to close the browser and re-open it (which only sometimes worked) or load up an alternate browser like IE or Chrome.
People's experiences with this bug weren't consistent - some people were affected, some not at all, and for some it was intermittent. To make matters worse, the only solution at the time was to install the Flash 10 player which was then still in beta and therefore unsupported by many large web sites, like CNN, for example. That site would prompt you to upgrade to Flash 9 as it thought you must be running an older version of Flash.
Both Mozilla and Adobe were aware of the issue, but neither company seemed to really know what the problem was. At one time, Adobe suspected that it was another Firefox plugin that was affecting Flash. The Mozilla developers also did their best to determine the cause on their end, too, but because Adobe was a closed-source company, their efforts could only go so far.
This fix came just in time. Because the issue had been going on for so long, people were getting comfortable running two browsers - Firefox (as usual) and one that played Flash, like Chrome. That opened the door for another big browser switch - this time away from Firefox instead of towards it. What a shame that would have been because otherwise, Firefox 3 is a great browser. We're happy to see that Adobe finally figured out the issue and has made Flash usable again.
Other New Features
As far as the other upgrades go, developers will be happy to learn that the new Flash Player supports the following:
- 3D transformations and animations that take advantage of GPU hardware acceleration
- New text rendering engine that lets developers create their own text layout components
- Pixel Blender integration which lets developers create custom filters and effects which can be applied at runtime to videos, images, and bitmaps
For more details on the technical aspects of these features, Josh Catone has a good write-up over on SitePoint.
You can download the new version of Flash from here: http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer
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This is great. Actually the features are very promising, lets see how this new flash works. Thanks for the link.
Don't forget to manage your privacy settings... http://www.imasuper.com/66/technology/flash-cookies-the-silent-privacy-killer/
Posted by: £ogical €xtremes
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October 15, 2008 8:13 AM
Big news!
Posted by: Yunus Tunak
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October 15, 2008 8:19 AM
thanks Sarah... great share!
Posted by: Susan Beebe
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October 15, 2008 8:22 AM
Were they not working before?
Posted by: Jason Shultz
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October 15, 2008 8:36 AM
NVM, I RTFA and see what was going on. I guess I was one of the lucky ones. woohoo!
Posted by: Jason Shultz
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October 15, 2008 8:37 AM
Wait- your Firefox didn't play back Flash 9 videos?
Are you serious?
They've been working just fine for us so far!
I just installed it -- let's see if it freezes on me as it's been doing in the last month or so.
Posted by: JungleG
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October 15, 2008 8:40 AM
Very good website. I liked it very much. Comments from http://www.valentineday.in
This bug affected Chrome as well.
@preetam They worked some of the time, but the browser and/or Flash player could get into a state where this bug manifested.
@JungleG et al: Please keep me posted on your experiences!
Posted by: Sarah Perez
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October 15, 2008 9:55 AM
I'm more impressed it was a simultaneous release across all operating systems... About time they got that right.
Posted by: Mark Philpot
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October 15, 2008 9:58 AM
@Brant I used Chrome to watch Flash videos when Firefox didn't work. Hadn't heard of Chrome issues...do you have some more info on that?
I'm pretty sure that the Flash video problem affected all NPAPI browsers (as opposed to the ActiveX browser, IE) because they all used the same Flash plug-in. There were plenty of Chrome and Safari users complaining about the problem too. Because it was intermittent for some, switching browsers or running two browsers was often helpful. There was also an easier workaround than restarting Firefox. Simply disabling and re-enabling the plug-in in Firefox's add-ons Manager then reloading the page fixed it for most people.
Great to see this fixed.
All this time cursing Vista... and it was FireFox/Flash?
The flash file uploader in Wordpress 2.6.* isn't working for me now. I'm not sure if it's related or not. But it was working before the ugprade.
Posted by: Jason Shultz
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October 15, 2008 11:22 AM
Do you guys want to be among the first to see one of the world's first applications build in Flash 10?
http://hobnox.com/audiotool
We recommend the Drum n' Bass setup to start with.
Enjoy...
I'm happy to say (HUGE knock on wood) Chrome hasn't crashed on me once after the upgrade (yes it looks like Flash already recognizes Chrome) -- haven't opened Firefox and Chrome at the same time tho', I'll keep you posted
Posted by: JungleG
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October 15, 2008 12:19 PM
Thank god! I'm already downloading the update but just to read this post makes me very glad to think that i'll be able to open up my 20 tabs full with videos at the same time again! = )
I can confirm definitively that this problem also affected Firefox 2. It is NOT only a Firefox 3 issue. It is 100% a Flash 9 issue.
I did not upgrade to Firefox 3, but as soon as I upgraded to Flash 9, YouTube and other streaming videos would stop after a couple of seconds, using Firefox 2.
It seemed to happen less often when I had only a handful tabs open, which was pretty much never.
(Speling [sic] mistake, first word of this article, "Abode". :D)
Flash 10 includes some security changes which have affected a number of flash-based upload tools - SWFUpload, YUI uploader etc. The security change was for good reason, but the easiest fix means rendering the "choose files" button in Flash as now the action to select files must originate there.
This bug happened in Opera also, albeit very rarely.
Now if they'd release a 64 bit version for Linux, all would be good.
If you are looking for a Flash based upload tool you should take a look at TWG Flash Uploader (http://www.tinywebgallery.com).
Because it is a flash only and not a Javascript/flash solution it still works fine after updating to Flash 10.
/Michael
Never heard of this problem ^^
Firefox 3.03 and flash 9 works 100% for me! (WIndows XP PRo SP3)
Do this upgraded automatically or I need to manually update to 10 ?
But indeed a good news :)
This actually happened for a couple of reasons.. one of the cuases was having more than 15 instances of Flash running. Which, if you have a couple of tabs going, is pretty easy to do with many sites that have a lot of separate SWF content.
Definitely resolved for FP10 though. I'm writing a technote on this now (though I wish the player team had sent it to me a few months ago. Perhaps we could have saved folks some trouble....)
Regards,
Bentley Wolfe
Senior Support Engineer, Flash/Flash Player/Digital Editions
Adobe