Frozen Firefox

[neilinoz]

It takes me time to discover how things work. Only 9 weeks ago I discovered that I could add sources to something called URPMI and download and install programs. Before that, I was pretty much trapped into what Mandrake 9.1/10.0 could offer.

 

So anyway, the other day I discovered that I could download a flash player for my MOZILLA 1.7 browser. I did so, and then I was able to finally play flash animations after 18 months without them. Not really missed I can tell you, but there were some websites that I couldn't access because of it. I had no problems in watching Flash animation in Mozilla.

 

Then yesterday I finally discovered a URPMI source with Firefox 1.0, which I then duly downloaded. I was impressed with how it asked me if I wanted to shift my Mozilla bookmarks and preferences across which made the changeover so much easier.

 

But then Firefox would freeze up. I went into my Gnome system monitor and saw that Mozilla-Firefox-bin was now "Sleeping" and another program "SWF-Play" had been opened but was sleeping too. I killed the SWF-Play and Firefox returned to normal. I then did a Google search for SWF play and found out that it was short for "Shock Wave Flash".

 

Further tests revealed that whenever I visited a page with a flash animation, Firefox would always freeze up. Killing SWF-play in my Gnome system monitor would then unfreeze everything - but of course there would be no flash animation visible. Any further websites that I visited with Flash would then freeze firefox again.

 

One more thing - sometimes when I have problems with programs it is usually viewable through the Gnome system monitor: A 100% CPU usage with very little happening until I then close the relevant program or web page. With this particular problem, however, the CPU is not running at 100%. Firefox is frozen when it hits a Flash animation, but the CPu is not over-active.

 

Any ideas?

Edited December 15, 2004 by neilinoz

[adamw]

swfplay is a free, written-from-scratch flash viewer. It does a good job in the circumstances, but if you're not overly ideological and you just want the browser to work you're probably better off installing the closed-source flash plugin from Adobe. You can download it from their website. Remove swfplay (or swfdec, whatever it's actually called) with the Mandrake package management tools - rpmdrake-remove or urpme.