up vote -1 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I'm unable to view Youtube videos or any sites that use Flash. If IE crashes I usually just switch to a different browser but now it's crashing in all 3 of the browsers I have. What's the cause?

Windows 7 64-bit IE 8

link|improve this question
44% accept rate
Do you have any more information on the crash? Is it just when you display the page or do you have to try to play the video? – ChrisF Jan 5 at 17:03
Perhaps you can remove your flash player via Add/Remove Programs, then install a fresh copy. You'll want to have your browsers closed for all of that. May be worth checking for Windows updates while you're at it. – Doc Jan 5 at 17:05
It appears that when I try to play a video it plays a green screen instead of the actual picture and then the browsers freeze--in all 3. – verve Jan 5 at 17:15
Doc, what is the latest plugin version? My browsers seem up-to-date. Flash always crashes so I just assumed that Adobe hasn't fixed the latest issue. – verve Jan 5 at 17:17
Is it possible to just reinstall the plugin part or do I have to uninstall everything that has Adobe in the title? Anyone link me to just a plugin upgrade? – verve Jan 5 at 17:22
feedback

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Only Adobe can even guess at the cause from such a paucity of data.

The rest of us aren't, in contrast, clairvoyant. There's no way for a non-clairvoyant to determine the cause from a mere "It crashes." as a description — especially as people sometimes have strange ideas as to what actually constitutes an applications program crashing. "the browsers freeze" isn't informative, either.

There are local fixes that are common across several problems.

Sometimes the process that is running Flash has become confused, or has died, or has lost its connection to the other processes in the WWW browser. One can, depending from the exact extent of the problem:

  1. Close down the WWW browser, so that all WWW browser processes exit, and then re-start it.
  2. Log off and then log back on again.
  3. Restart the machine.

For Google Chrome, one has further alternatives:

  1. YouTube nowadays has the ability to send video in HTML5 form, which doesn't involve Flash at all. One could switch from Flash Video to HTML5.
  2. There are often in fact two Flash video players in a Google Chrome installation — the built-in one and the one from the Flash Player plug-in. One could selectively enable and disable these to switch from the one to the other.

Further reading

link|improve this answer
Interesting link. – verve Feb 4 at 0:56
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.