Fix for Flash Player crashes in Firefox

     

As usually in computing, most great new innovations come with some pain in the f*cking ass. One of the recent pains is a Flash Player update (somewhere around 11.3) which adds some sandboxing feature of sorts, dubbed Protected Mode. This is great and all, but on certain comps it just doesn’t work. It causes your up-to-date Firefox (at least around version 13) to crash, err, pretend to be crashing. If you fiddle around with your Firefox config (i.e. about:config), and set

dom.ipc.plugins.processLaunchTimeoutSecs = 2
dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs = 2

You’ll see that those pages will render eventually, although Flash content will be borked.

What I find amusing is that Adobe Reader has the same feature, but it will tell you upon startup that it failed to initialize Protected Mode and asks you to decide whether to disable it or close Adobe Reader altogether. Well, for Adobe Flash it won’t happen. So what should you do? Disable it manually. Open

  • 32 bit system: %SystemRoot%\system32\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg
  • 64 bit system: %SystemRoot%\syswow64\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg

And add the following line:

ProtectedMode=0

That’s it.