Most reliable Flash Player combo

Question

Hey everyone,
I am looking for information about Flash Player reliability. I know from experience, that it crashes sometimes on Windows OS using Mozilla Firefox (at least in my case, don't know why). I can't stand it anymore for various reasons.
My question is: is there any Flash Player operating system + browser composition, that can make me sure that it won't crash at all? Or is there any composition that can minimize this risk to almost 0%?
Thanks in advance.
Br,
Galinaf

Answer 1

Each version of Flash Player includes important security updates.  You always want to use the latest version of Flash Player.
Protected Mode for Firefox is an important security mitigation designed to provide defense-in-depth protections against modern malware targeting Flash Player.  To address the growing body of attacks against Firefox, we retrofit a sandboxing approach to Firefox's plugin architecture NPAPI, which originated in the 1990s.
There's a good explanation of what this looks like, here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/security/2012/06/inside-flash-player-protected-mode-for-firefox.htm l
Flash and Firefox use a communication channel provided by the operations system called IPC (Inter-Process Communication) to pass messages. In addition to the multiple layers of abstraction introduced by Protected Mode, there are two additional layers between Firefox and our broker.  This means that each message passed between Flash and Firefox is passed through four different processes, and there are four times as many messages being passed.
What we observe when we look into the typical generic Flash/Firefox hang, is that a message is dropped or delivered out of order, and one of the parties just sits around waiting for a response that never comes.  Eventually Firefox's 30 second hang detection kicks in, and it safely kills the Flash Player process, which then triggers the crashed plugin screen.
We've spent a lot of time playing with this, and what we generally find is that disabling any of the layers in this stack, Protected Mode, PlugIn Container, etc, causes an improvement in stability.  Our working theory is that by reducing the number of messages that get passed, we don't see the problems with messages getting dropped.  We're not maxing out the message-passing capacity, and things work as intended.
Competing browsers like Google Chrome and Internet Explorer have invested heavily in creating modern plug-in architectures that offer both security and efficiency advantages.  Unfortunately, Mozilla envisions a future without plugins, and modernizing the plugin APIs to provide both security and efficiently is not a priority for Firefox.