Fixing Adobe Flash Player Problems in Firefox 49

Honestly, I haven’t used Adobe Flash for some time now and I don’t really miss it. I can watch Youtube videos without any problems as they all work perfectly smooth with the HTML5 video enabled browsers like Firefox. But nevertheless, if you are using Adobe Flash in Firefox on your Windows PC, you might have noticed huge resources consumption, system hang ups and CPU usage surges. Actually, when I tried to access some videos on some streaming sites in Firefox with Adobe Flash installed, my Windows 10 PC ran into the BSOD which was very surprising.

So how do you go around fixing this Adobe Flash issue that exists with Firefox version 49? Here are three simple ways to fix this problem:

1. Make changes to the Firefox settings
Adobe Flash uses something called asynchronous drawing which is a way the Flash plugin and Firefox share the bitmap surface where the animation or video is displayed. Since there is a problem in the way Firefox 49 handles this, you can disable this feature in Firefox for a quick and temporary fix:

  1. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and press Enter.
  2. Click on the I accept the risk button to proceed on the warranty warning page.
  3. Look for a setting named dom.ipc.plugins.asyncdrawing.enabled and double-click on it to switch its value from true to false.Fix Flash Problem in Firefox 49

2. Use Firefox Nightly
As per the adobe Flash website, the asynchronous drawing feature is fully supported by Firefox version 51 which is still available from the Firefox Nightly channel. So if you want to keep using Adobe Flash, you can switch to the Firefox Nightly and see if it makes any difference. You can download the Firefox Nightly from https://nightly.mozilla.org/.

3. Uninstall Adobe Flash Player Plugin
As I have already explained, with the advent of HTML5 video technology, the Flash player plugin has almost become obsolete. All the popular websites now support for HTML5 video and you will hardly have any problem living without Flash player. So you can go ahead and uninstall Adobe Flash Player and enjoy the life without any Flash errors or vulnerabilities.

Conclusion: Adobe Flash might cause some problems in the version 49 of Firefox, but it will be fixed in the future versions of Firefox. You can easily fix this problem in more ways than one.