title: flashblock link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/flashblock/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 357 created: 2009/03/18 14:03:22 created_gmt: 2009/03/18 14:03:22 comment_status: open post_name: flashblock status: publish post_type: post

flashblock

I consider myself a good Internet citizen, not prone to mischief like blocking blipverts, eh adverts, and things like that.

The last couple of weeks I’ve had a problem though. The latest alpha of Adobe’s 64-bit Flash plugin has been crashing Firefox on certain sites. One of these is nytimes.com. Now this condition only exists on my work desktop, a Dell GX620 machine with a 64-bit Prescott (P4 630 - 80547) H.T. processor and the ubiquitous Intel GM950 graphics subsystem. This system is running Ubuntu 8.10 patched to date. I don’t have this problem on any of my other Ubuntu systems. The only real difference between my work machines and those other systems is that they all have true dual core CPU’s and NVIDIA graphics. Given the graphics intensive nature of most flash video, I’m leaning towards this being a GPU, not a CPU, problem. Not to mention that in my experience Intel graphics are truly awful when compared to almost all others.

As a workaround I’ve installed Flashblock on all my machines. Including the Windows ones. This has the added benefit of speeding up the loading of many web pages, and lets me avoid annoying flash advertising.

Software bugs have consequences. You drove me to this, Adobe.

UPDATE:

It’s the CPU. Confirmed here. Basically the problem is that the infernal Prescott CPU is a complete waste of therms. I already knew it wasn’t a true dual core (although Linux thought it was) and as a result performed horribly in situations that even the old Smithfield in my home machine would breeze right through. The problem with 64-bit Flash turns out to be its reliance on the LAHF flag, something that the Prescott doesn’t implement (looks like it didn’t exist back when the CPU was made). I verified this by doing a cat against /proc/cpuinfo on all my machines. The only one that came up short was the work destkop that is having this problem. One workaround is to just surrender and install 32-bit flashplugin-nonfee and nspluginwrapper. Unless there’s some change in how the 64-bit version gets compiled (apparently it could be redone without the dependency on LAHF), that’s probably what I’ll do for this one machine.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo