Actually I just checked, it's only 224 hours. I assume that's bicycling non-stop though.

How cost effective is this? Sure it's only a $2 adapter, but then you need a $400-$700 phone to attach it to (that's the actual price of the hardware mentioned, when not subsidized by a long term monthly contract, which costs even more). Surely for $400 someone could build a standalone vision testing device that is more accurate?

In perspective, it's like a television manufacturer fixing the stream of a particular television channel because it is incorrect. Firefox should not be protecting third party website owners from their mistakes. Second they should not be protecting poorly coded third party plugins. That is why we have the crash protection to begin with! It's the same reason why too many content producers give up with standards because invalid code 'just works'. Where is the incentive to get things right?

Extending this reasoning, if any website takes too long to load, Firefox should simply close the tab, and tell the user that the website has crashed? I guess you're right, that would definitely put pressure on web developers to make sure their sites loaded fast enough to not get rejected by Firefox...but I think this heavy-handed approach is the wrong way to go about it. Pop up a dialog telling the user that XYZ is going too slow, the plugin is hanging, and would you like to kill it? This will let them know why their PC is going slow, but still giving them the choice to continue if they wish. I thought choice was the whole reason people like Firefox, Open Source, etc.

It's not crap :(

Some types of complex applications are just not possible in HTML5, and even if they were, wouldn't be available to 50%+ of our users (eg people using IE). So the only solution if we want to get our product to market today, is to use Flash. Believe me, I hate Flash ad banners and crappy Flash navigation websites as much as the next guy. But when you're doing an advance online collaboration application, your only choices are pretty much Java, Silverlight, or Flash. And for various reasons, Flash sucks the least out of all three of them.

When HTML5 is sufficient and has the marketshare to do what we want, I'll be right up there with RMS trying to port my apps to it, but it's just not the reality today.


tl;dr; sorry for feeding the trolls.

See, the problem was I didn't even suspect Firefox was the cause, since Firefox itself was telling me Flash was crashing. Why would I search for a fix in Firefox, when I believe Firefox is not the problem?

It's some combination of:
1. Having a slow PC
2. Other apps in background using up CPU
3. single-threaded execution -- which means that as long as a single chunk of code in a Flash / Ajax app is running, it can't report back to the browser to let the browser update itself and do other things, making it appear hung.

Means that for some complex chunk of code, say the initialization routines of a game, might take up to 10 seconds to finish. People don't care as much about waiting 10 seconds for a game to load, heck for desktop, non-web, games, people often wait much longer for a game to load.

What's interesting is that you can hang the browser from either Javascript (aka Ajax) or from within a plugin (like Flash or Java). But in the case of Ajax, the browser will first ask you if you want to terminate, or continue running, but it doesn't give the same choice to code running in a plugin.

You can adjust the time, but it's in an obscure about:config setting, like many of Firefox's advanced settings.

I think terminating the plugin automatically is the wrong choice. If JavaScript takes too long, they don't terminate it, but instead ask the user if they want to keep running or terminate. One has to wonder why they give more leeway to applications written in JavaScript than applications written in ActionScript, seeing as how either one is just as capable of hanging your browser.

Notably, Chrome gives you the same popup dialog for both JS applications and plugins. My guess is Firefox devs are more anti-Flash, and don't mind killing it, and only relented when they realized how many of their userbase they might lose when they start interfering with people's Farmville addictions.

The other annoying thing about this "hung plugin detector"? It counts a Flash plugin paused for debugging (so you can look at the call stack, step through code, etc) as hung. For weeks I've been cursing Flash for always crashing in Firefox, because when Firefox kills the plugin, it displays the same generic message as if the plugin has actually crashed. Only recently did I find out that Firefox is the real cause of my pain, not Adobe!

I wish they had done it like Chrome, or like Firefox already does with JS, where instead it pops up a little dialog telling you that the plugin is unresponsive, and would you like to kill it? Seems very suspicious, I wonder if there's someone at Mozilla with an anti-Flash agenda that wants to make Flash look more unstable than it really is?

It's most obvious in the grass IMO. Compare vp8.png to x264.png, in x264 the grass looks fairly normal, but in vp8 it looks like a blurry mush.

It's a valid worry. Imagine someone famous today made a recording of someone, but it was lost in a closet/attic/junkpile for 80 years. What are the chances of any DVD-R, USB flash drive, HDD made today having any chance of working in 80 years?

Seriously...Xbox 360 was just on sale for $150 with $50 back in gift card, but I still couldn't bring myself to buy one. Looking at the top 50 360 games, there were maybe 3 I was interested in playing. The rest were either things I wasn't interested in (FPS, Driving Simulators) or were available on other platforms.

I use the one from googlebar.mozdev.org all day long...i like being able to one-click access the many various google searches (maps / products / images / video / web / etc)

Well...if your original image is 256 colors or less, then GIF is not lossy.

Just reproduced it with Chrome 6.0.401.1 dev on windows. It remembers your zoom level even if you close chrome completely, making sure there are no chrome.exe processes running, then start chrome back up. Just because it doesn't affect some older versions does not mean this story is false.

I didn't see any "Terms Of Service" at all? I just googled "adobe swf format", got this page: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ Which let me download a PDF without agreeing to any license. There are no mentions of "Terms Of Service" in the Gnash FAQ, though they do reference the EULA which is included with Adobe tools, however as I linked above, you can download the SWF format specification without agreeing to anything and without installing any Adobe tools.