Flash Player 11.4.402.265 and Firefox 15/15.0.1 Not Compatible?

Question

I have mentioned this in two recent posts, but wanted to start a new thread to call attention to what I believe is an important issue.
Starting with the update of Firefox 15, and continuing into version 15.0.1, my Firefox browser has logged a series of "silent" crashes.  By silent I mean that there was no visible sign that a crash had taken place.  I found out about them by typing about:crashes into Firefox's address bar.  (I actually do this about once per week just to make sure that there are no problems that should be addressed.)
All of the crashes--and there were dozens--were "empty" in that no source could be identified.  Specifically, the following appeared at the top of each crash report:
Firefox Crash Reports [@ EMPTY: no crashing thread identified; corrupt dump ]
In addition, the crashes were intermittent.   I checked this out by constantly checking for new crashes after calling up various web sites.  For instance, I would would go to Google News, check for a crash report, go to a feature story, check for a crash report, watch a YouTube video, check for a crash report, close Firefox, open it, check for a crash report, etc.  What I found was that I often would visit 20 or more sites before a crash report was filed; however,  an average of  ten crashes appeared daily--again, all with NO indication of what had caused the crash. 
At first, I could see no pattern, so I troubleshooted by enabling/disabling hardware acceleration for both Firefox and Flash Player, enabling/disabling cookies, enabling/disabling JavaScript, etc. I spent several hours doing this.
I also scoured the various Firefox "help" forums, but it seemed that the same answers appeared on all of the forums, and they pretty much echoed the troubleshooting steps I had taken. (It seems that the major issue now is the fact that hardware acceleration causes Firefox 15.0.1 to crash for many users.)
Finally, I noticed that I had been on a site containing an embedded flash video, just prior to a crash.  (Interestingly, I never received a crash report after watching a YouTube video on YouTube.)   I then tried disabling Protected Mode in Flash Player, which worked several months ago after the new "sandboxing" provision was introduced, and was found to be incompatible with the then-version of Firefox. So far, this has stopped all crashes.  After three days of normal usage and surfing, there have been no reports, whereas, prior to doing this, I was averaging at least one per hour. 
This leads me to believe that the designers of the  latest version of Firefox have either omitted whatever code string was used to fix the problem that occurred last June, or some new, incompatible code has been included.    Either way, I think that this should be looked into by BOTH Adobe and Mozilla as soon as possible--but especially by Mozilla, since Flash Player 11.4.402.265 worked just fine with Firefox 14.0.1.
It should be noted, by the way, that I did a recent check of Firefox's "top crashers" and the empty crash report is by far the most common--over 877,000 at the time I checked.  If I understood the graph, there has been an escallation since the introduction of version 15.0.  How many of them are silent, and therefore, unnoticed by the users, is anyone's guess, but I suspect that I'm not the only user on the planet this is happening to.
In case it's needed, I'm using:
Windows 7, Home Premium Service Pack 1 (Windows Classic user interface)
Firefox 15.0.1
Flash Player 11.4.402.265
Hardware Acceleration disabled for both Firefox and Flash Player
Since all of my crash reports, prior to disabling Protected Mode, were useless, I have deleted them.
Ortho_Fan
Message was edited by: Ortho_Fan  ADDED -- 9/15/12 --   I periodically check Windows 7's "Performance Monitor" and noticed today that one of the "silent crashes" was picked up by Windows.  The following details were posted:
Description Faulting application name: firefox.exe, version: 15.0.1.4631, time stamp: 0x5047f9c5 Faulting module name: xul.dll, version: 15.0.1.4631, time stamp: 0x5047f93b Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x0010e567 Faulting process id: 0xc58 Faulting application start time: 0x01cd90439a1b1c12 Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\xul.dll Report Id: a2ad4a6b-fc37-11e1-830c-e0cb4efc1b05
This appeared before I disabled Flash Player's Protected Mode, but coincides with one of the empty crashes reported in Firefox.  I know nothing about Windows crashes, where to find the reports, etc.

Answer 1

Hi schützenkönig:
Many thanks for posting!  As you can see, I made my initial post over a week ago, and since there were no responses, I thought perhaps I was the only one this was happening to!
In any event, disabling Protected Mode is the only way I've found to prevent the crashes from happening.
I posted about this on the mozillazine forum -- http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2551745&sid=7e877237158ffdc560789fb668c 858c0 -- but didn't get very far.  Apparently, Firefox is blaming Adobe and has no plans to do anything about it.  I was given some reassurance, however, by the comment that adblock plus offers protection from harmful flash content.
By the way, I made a follow on post when I downloaded the latest version of Flash Player -- 11.4.402.278  -- http://forums.adobe.com/message/4708561#4708561
Unfortunately, it did nothing to fix the problem.
Ortho_Fan