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How to fix Flash video performance in Firefox
Do YouTube and other Flash-based videos stutter when you view them in Firefox, but work fine in other browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari? This appears to be a problem that affects both the Windows and Mac versions of Firefox, and the problem (surprisingly enough) turns out not to be Flash - it's Firefox's session restore feature.
Lifehacker has a post based on information that one of their readers wrote in with. Basically, Firefox takes a snapshot of all of your open tabs every ten seconds, so that if you close your browser, you can open it to where you left off. Though you wouldn't think grabbing the plain text URL of a few webpages would be such an arduous task for the browser that it causes video to stutter, for some reason it is.
So what's the solution? Well, if you want to throw the baby out with the bath water, you can turn off the session restore feature altogether. A more sane solution is to simply lengthen the period of time between snapshots. To do this, type about:config into Firefox's address bar, then in the filter box enter browser.sessionstore.interval. The default value is 10000, which is the number of milliseconds between snapshots. Setting the number to 120000 lengthens the period to two minutes, a more reasonable but still useful period. Of course, you can set it to whatever you want, as long as you keep in mind that you're dealing with milliseconds.
I can't tell you how happy I am with this little hack - it has already prevented me from cursing Firefox a few times today.
Comments
12
Subscribe to commentstunamanAug 22nd 2009 4:44PM
Gee, I discovered this back in November 2008:
http://jimcofer.com/personal/?p=2017
KevinAug 22nd 2009 6:34PM
Oh shut up.
2late2dieAug 22nd 2009 9:44PM
And you've been sitting on this gold mine for a year?!?! So selfish! :)
Anyway, you guys should really stop watching so much YouTube. How about letting us know of some useful apps?
just kidding... sort of... maybe... :)
UnknownAug 22nd 2009 5:23PM
Thanks! This has been killing my ability to play flash games.
iofthestormAug 22nd 2009 10:23PM
Eh, it's not like it's just saving the plain text url. Session restore also saves form data, and I think possibly tries to cache stuff too, because sometimes if Firefox crashes and then I lose my internet connection when the session restores the pages still come up.
BananaBoatAug 23rd 2009 3:56AM
Flash has been a problem in Firefox for as long as I can remember. If this is really all it takes to fix it, then I'm certainly willing to give it a try. Does this fix the problem of the audio dropping out of flash videos as well?
3.5 has been crashing on me a lot lately. I'm about ready to go back to 3.0, unless I can find the source of the problem (as always, I've got to assume it is an add-on causing it, though who can ever know for sure)
Thanks
Saint SeminoleAug 23rd 2009 2:56PM
I guess I'm fortunate -- haven't had this problem at all in FF 3.5.2... Maybe some other setting of mine has fixed it by accident. Thanks for the tip, just in case it starts to happen for me...
ChrisAug 24th 2009 11:48PM
I've got a better solution.
The TabMix Plus extension offers the ability to replace the built in session restore function in Firefox with its own more powerful and customizable version.
I've yet to see any flash video stuttering even with Youtube in full screen HD since I installed it.
Omer ZachSep 3rd 2009 8:34PM
You'd think they would just record your actions when you navigate to a new page, open a new tab or window, etc.
Dantk2Sep 15th 2009 4:25AM
Didn't help me, video keeps flashing and stuttering, but thanks anyway
SteveSep 19th 2009 6:40PM
Did not work.
cptsilverOct 1st 2009 12:37PM
wanted this to work, but didn't... flash still sucks in FF