Just recently, I've experienced problems which appear to come from the Flash player in Firefox. If I would stream audio from a site that used Flash (such as www.jazzradio.com/mellowjazz), the CPU usage for Firefox would go through the roof, slowing down everything else. The same thing happens if I try it on Google Chromium browser, so I am thinking it must be something to do with the Flash player support for my Ubuntu 12.04....? I would also say that playing YouTube videos in Firefox does not produce this massive CPU usage.

I also noticed the process "Plugin-container" was using loads of memory and CPU, but disabling this in the about:config settings just increases the amount of crashes Firefox has. It is my understanding that the purpose of plugin-container is to prevent plugin crashes, so that makes sense.

I am aware that Adobe don't support Flash updates anymore, so my updating options are limited.

I thought initially it was because I was running an older version of Firefox, so I updated it to the latest, version 33. I still get the slowdown and in addition Firefox crashes on startup unless I disable the Flashblock add-in, which I have now done. So, massive slowdown for Flash streaming and a shedload of Flash ads on websites, that were previously blocked. Well, this is getting better and better...

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be going wrong with the Flash music streaming on certain sites? Is it possible to still update the Flash plugin on my machine (which presumably is shared between Chromium and Firefox, since I get the slowdown on both browsers)?

Thank you for any help you can give.

Steve

I've tried listening to Jazzradio on Iceweasel (Debian's Firefox) and nothing appears to be slowing down. Running top in a terminal reports about 10% CPU usage. I'm using version 31.2 of Iceweasel. I also tried Opera Developer and Chrome (not Chromium) and also no slowdown.
Thanks for the Jazzradio link. I'm listening to it as I type this message.
jdk

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fyi - youtube will default to an html5 video player instead of flash if your browser supports it, which chromium and firefox both do (depending on version of course). youtube by default will only use flash for drm'd content, like some movie trailers and commercial music videos. the html5 and flash players have an identical user interface. You can right click on a playing video to see what player is being used. so you might or might not have been using flash on youtube.

also, google-chrome (not chromium) has its own flash support (called pepperflash) that is still supported by adobe. you might try the chrome browser to see if your cpu usage improves.

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Hmm... well, I upgraded to the latest Firefox yesterday (version 33) and I have got Jazzradio.com playing now. The CPU usage appears today to have reverted to a more acceptable level. Perhaps I needed to do a total hard reboot in order for the complete update to take effect, or something. How very Windows 95!

Youtube is still playing videos as Flash, without any option that I can see to switch to HTML5, and as I say, I am using FF version 33. However, it doesn't matter too much for YouTube since I tend to use the youtube-dl program to download the videos straight, then watch them on MPlayer rather than streaming them.

The Firefox extension 'Flashblocker' does not seem to work any more without causing FF to crash, so I have changed the Flash playing options in Firefox to "Ask to activate", so I get the message in Flash windows to click. Crude and ugly, but effective. Does anyone have any tips for a better way to block Flash adverts on web pages...?

Chrome itself does not appear in the Ubuntu repositories, only Chromium, but could you explain in practical terms if it is better and why? I see from the Wikipedia entry that it seems to be a proprietary version of Chromium and includes its own Flash player. Is this still the case, now that Adobe have stopped updating it?

Thank you both for your assistance.

Adobe still updates the flashplayer in chrome. Its the same flash player in chromeOS. The flash in chrome will work on certain drm'd youtube videos where the regular flash will not. I held out for a long time with chromium, but soon even the regular flash plugin will not work in chromium as they eliminate support for the old netscape-plugin api.

Okay, thanks. Might swap to Chrome browser at some stage then.