Solved Giving up Chrome for any flash content viewing

Back when Chrome first came out, I didn't rush to use it (I'm not an early adopter type when it comes to browsers). I was a devoted Firefox and IE user, favoring Firefox a little more. But over time, there began this period where Firefox started getting sluggish and couldn't handle streaming video very well. Chrome worked better than Firefox and IE, so I switched to it.

I've been using Chrome for 3 years now, mostly with good results until sometime during this past year. I started to notice video in the embedded flash player getting choppy and also crashing a lot more than it used to (previously it would happen maybe once a month--now it's like a few times per week). I fired up IE9 and checked it out, and video performance is much better.

The problems weren't limited to just running flash. I found that responsiveness would get sluggish when navigating between tabs and some pages would stop responding to scrolling. Also, sometimes Chrome would fail to refresh the content--it would look like the same page was present on multiple tabs, and I'd have to go back-and-forth to trigger the refresh.

So... I don't know if there's some tweaking that can be done in Chrome to fix this. I did find one suggestion on HowToGeek that shows one solution for crashes. I tried it and it does seem to be working, where Chrome is crashing less often, but the other problems persist. It's odd too, because Adobe seems to provide flash updates rather frequently, like one or two per month.

Anyone else here had Adobe Flash player problems with Chrome?

I've had a few, I'm pretty sure you replied to my thread with the youtube black screen.

After re-installing the newest version of chrome it all seemed to be better though.

I was able to clean it up again. This time I had to disable the "Pepper Flash" (c:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\21.0.1180.83\PepperFlash\pepflashplayer.dll). There are 3 plug-ins installed with Flash, but apparently only one is really necessary. I'm not sure why they do this, but it smells of being "too clever" and sacrificing other things for it. Anyway, it's working better now.

Still, IE9 seems to load a little faster and video looks just a tiny bit smoother.

Some videos with Chrome. like The Daily Show, are choppy. I'm using the most recent version. In Chrome settings, all I have is their Pepper Flash so when I disable it I can't see video at all. Any idea for help here? Maybe it's my computer, but I'm amazed that Chrome is causing me this problem. It can't play videos smoothly?

Thanks.

The tips/techniques to work around these video streaming problems keep fluctuating in effectiveness from update to update. Frankly, I just keep several browsers handy and switch when one starts showing lagging effects after an update. I just can't be bothered with trying to hunt down a solution. I suggest having IE9, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera on the ready.

Thanks. I figured that's what you've got to do.

Cytherian said:

The tips/techniques to work around these video streaming problems keep fluctuating in effectiveness from update to update. Frankly, I just keep several browsers handy and switch when one starts showing lagging effects after an update. I just can't be bothered with trying to hunt down a solution. I suggest having IE9, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera on the ready.

Click to expand...

I was using chromium snap shots for the last couple of years. The main incentive was snappy loading off the disk even if the HD was busy like during an MBAM scan. But I found the 16.x Firefox and 64 bit Waterfox for my 64 bit PC, load nearly as fast to a blank page. Plus it only runs one process instead of more than a dozen chrome.

I get to use all my favorite FF AddOns like SyncPlaces. I still keep a chromium snap shot as secondary browser on each 32 or 64 bit PC.

I was surprised Waterfox had no problem with any of my AddOns. Even plays flash video fine. Now that FF is responsive again I rarely need to use chromium.

They broke Mr Tech but I found another AddOn that neutralizes that check compatibility crap. It's called checkCompatibility

Kind of counter-intuitive since it enabled that in order to disable the check on FF load. No more list of AddOns that don't have a large enough MaxVersion number. My SyncPlaces, CheckPlaces and TabMixPlus work fine.