… is almost as bad as ever before.

On my Core 1 Duo system (32 bit), official Adobe Flash crashes my browser when I close a tab which had a Flash plugin running. Going to a blank page then closing the tab usually helps, but it seems that sometimes Flash continues to run in the background (sound doesn’t stop either) and then will still crash.

On my AMD64 system, the official Adobe plugin crashes my browser. There are reports at Adobe that link it to Gmail. So here, the Adobe flash is unusable. The 32 bit version via nspluginwrapper did not have sound for me, probably some issue with Pulseaudio.

So I’m now trying out Gnash. First thing I noticed: it has FlashBlock built in, all those stupid Flash things won’t auto-run but I’ll always have the nice play button to enable them when I want them to run. And while Gnash is working pretty well on most sites, every now and then something just does not work. Like some YouTube movies not playing (usually very short ones - maybe it will only start playing a video when the buffer was completely filled, and a video which is smaller than the buffer will thus not play?) etc.

Some wishlist items:

  • Add a ‘auto run whitelist’ to Gnash, when I go to YouTube I usually want to actually run the video.
  • Provide some ‘fall through’ option, so if the Flash doesn’t work right in Gnash I can pass it on to the Adobe plugin if I really need to.

I know that the latter won’t be easy, but isn’t nspluginwrapper doing something like that?