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Comment by m104 | Hacker News Reader

Much praise to the Google Chrome team for handling this sort of thing gracefully.

And much praise to the Opera team for just not crashing in the first place. I can zoom in the blue square, move around, etc. and the page is still fine after a minute or so leaving it open.

This is excellent. But I wish I could see an error/warning message a la Chrome.

However, i did notice a perceptible bump in memory usage via the System Monitor panel applet. The POC probably exploits a known Memory-allocation bug.

[Currently running Opera 10.10/i686 Linux] Edited: Grammar

Chrome doesn't crash either, just the plugin in a separate process.

Same with the latest versions of Safari, except it takes down all instances of Flash, even those in other pages, which is obviously inferior.

Can anyone enlighten me on this? I noticed the same thing:

* Viewing this page in Firefox 3.6 on Windows caused Flash to crash, taking the browser down with it.

* Viewing it in Chrome on the same machine caused the Flash plugin subprocess to crash, resulting in an error message in Chrome.

* However, no crash occurred in Opera. This despite the fact that 32-bit Opera on Windows does not appear to use isolated subprocesses for running NSAPI plugins.

So what's going on here? Does Opera use some sort of in-process isolation to protect the browser from its plugins? Or is there perhaps some quirk of running in the Opera environment that caused this Flash crash not to be triggered like it was in Firefox and Chrome?

Adobe Flash on Opera/Linux has always been quirky , crashy and all-round unreliable for me in the past. So, I use Opera as my pure-HTML+javascript browser, with ALL plugins, sound, animation, and Java plugins turned off in Global preferences.

Going off-topic [Opera praise]: These settings instantly turn Opera into the most stable and shockingly scalable 'Research and reference' browser I've used. I only use Firefox3.5.x solely for web-dev, Google Apps, heavy-JS Web 2.0 apps, and Flash-enabled sites of course (with Flashblock as first-line-defence).

Konqueror stays open too!

Yeah, it also looks like Safari's recent improvements in terms of plugins that they introduced in Snow Leopard have successfully prevented this problem from taking down the whole browser.

How recent? 4.0.4 crashed for me.

The Firefox nightly (3.7a1pre) also crashed.

NOTE: I generally browse with ClickToFlash active in Safari. That of course prevented the crash (until I clicked).

With Safari 4.0.4 (ClickToFlash turned off) the browser was fine but the Flash plug-in died, and Safari informed me:

> Flash Player (Safari Intenet plug-in) quit unexpectedly. > This report will be sent to Apple automatically.

PS: 10.6.2, FWIW

You need to have at least Snow Leopard, I believe. Apple recently moved plugins to separate processes, which prevents the entire browser from crashing. Flash will crash, but it won't take down the whole browser.

Except IIRC this wasn't about security or stability; it was because they went 64-bit on everything and needed a way to have the 64-bit apps and 32-bit plugins interact sanely.

It handles it less gracefully than I would have assumed. If you are running flash in multiple Chrome windows, this will corrupt ALL of them, instead of just the one visiting the page linked above. Wasnt one of Chrome's huge selling features the idea of memory independence?

Flash is to blame for that one.

Memory independence + plugin that isn't designed to run multiple processes = plugin that can only run in one process. Imagine if Flash, forced into running twice, tried to read and write from the same cookie / any other kind of data, without any concurrency tools of any kind.

Chrome has to run Flash how Flash wants to be run, because doing otherwise could cause massive problems with any plugin. This is part of why it took so long for them to make Chrome, resolving the memory independence desires with the needs of plugins requires giving some things up. It was either roughly all plugins in existence, or allow the same process to interact with multiple tabs / windows.

This sounds a bit fishy to me. Of course Flash can be run from multiple processes simultaneously since it naturally runs inside of multiple browsers simultaneously, and I assume Chrome has some internal (socket based?) IPC that they're using anyway...

Part of the difficulty is that this problem applies to all plugins. Flash may be able to handle it just fine, in which case it could just be a poor plugin, but what about any other plugin out there?

Heck, Firefox uses a lock-file in your profile to prevent multiple instances from running. What's to stop a plugin from requiring such a file, writing / reading it frequently, and having no error handling because it's only designed to run singly? Ultimately, you either harden the separations to run multiple instances of it, breaking many in the process and possibly damaging data irrecoverably, or you just let the plugin decide and have backwards compatibility, which is hugely important for a browser.

Flash on multiple browsers has completely separate cookie and data stores. Flash on a single browser has a single cookie and data store. Without introducing a complex forking/merging infrastructure for that data (which only Adobe would be able to create anyway) you're stuck with a single process for the plugin for all of the tabs in a single browser.

Flash actually has one cookie & data store. It exists between browsers.

You can see your flash cookies at this website:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...

You'll notice that they are the same no matter what browser you use.

This page crashed flash for me! Wow!

Interestingly enough the "libflashplugin.so" bar popped up on Gmail for me the last time that all my Flash instances crashed. I never realized that GMail used Flash. (The bar only seemed to pop up on tabs that were using Flash, not all tabs had the warning at the top)

Gmail uses flash for the file upload progress bar when adding an attachment. Will HTML5 allow developers to add this feature?

Flash is also used to make that popping sound when you get a gtalk message.

It is? Why?

Don't know about HTML5 (I can hope), but it can be accomplished with JS + hidden iframe for uploading. I think it requires querying the server for the progress, but I could be wrong there.

Firefox 3.7a also handles this quite well, with a 'A plugin crashed' message.

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