914002 - Flash crash in full screen mode disables dock and menu

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect, P3)

Description

[daf]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130905180733

Steps to reproduce:

1) Put firefox in fullscreen mode
2) Play flash video on youtube
3) Enable full screen on the youtube video
3) make flash crash or just force quit the flash process


Actual results:

While firefox is the active application the dock and menu will no longer be accessible making it impossible to task switch with just the mouse or access any of the menu options, only after restarting firefox is the dock and menu restored while it's the active application. Mouse cursor may also become invisible until flash plugin is reloaded again after crash.


Expected results:

The dock and menu to be always available including wile flash is doing full screen playback (observed behavior in Chrome)

Comment 1

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

Confirming on Nightly & OS X 10.8.

Benoit, Steven, are we missing some recovery for this scenario in PluginInterposeOSX.mm?

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Does the same thing happen if Firefox is not in fullscreen mode? This sounds like Flash is hiding the dock and then crashing, which is bad but not something we should necessarily work around unless it happens a lot.

Comment 3

[Georg Fritzsche [:gfritzsche]]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #2)
> Does the same thing happen if Firefox is not in fullscreen mode?

Yes, it does.

Comment 4

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I'll take a closer look at this later today.

In the meantime, does the same thing happen (in FF) with earlier versions of Flash?  Or with other plugins like QuickTime or Silverlight?

What happens, testing with the current Flash version, in Safari, Opera and Chromium?  (You might also test with Chrome, but Chrome bundles its own version of Flash.)

Comment 5

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #2)
> Does the same thing happen if Firefox is not in fullscreen mode? This sounds
> like Flash is hiding the dock and then crashing, which is bad but not
> something we should necessarily work around unless it happens a lot.

I implemented fullscreen flash support in bug 577494. Flash makes calls to reorder the plugin windows above the browser which was broken with OOP because we have no window in the plugin process so we swizzle the calls. We can make our swizzle methods recover from a Flash crash if we wanted.

I believe we can extend HideOSChromeOnScreen to use new features in 10.6+ for entering presentation mode. It might help here.

Comment 6

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

Benoit:  Do you want to take this, or would you prefer that I do it?

Comment 7

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

My backlog is too high, sorry.

Comment 8

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I really don't think this is a high-priority item to fix. Please don't let it get in the way of other important issues.

Comment 9

[Steven Michaud [:smichaud] (Retired)]

I agree, and I won't :-)

But this may have an easy fix/workaround.  So I hope to have time in the next couple of weeks to look for one.

Comment 10

[daf]

I marked it major because it's a close equivalent of flash crashing the entire browser since normal OS operation becomes broken until you restart it, furthermore if the user is unaware of task switching or application quitting keyboard shortcuts the only obvious solution to fix it if Firefox is in full screen mode would be a full computer reboot further exacerbating the problem (edge case but not beyond the realm of possibility).

Having to suffer this bug on nearly a daily basis due to flash frequent crashing I personally consider it a priority.

As for solutions i'd think changing flash dock/menu hiding to behave like OSX full screen mode (the dock and menu reappear if the cursor touches the edges of the screen) would be a good start as at least the navigation would remain available if it crashed or even during flash full screen usage.

Comment 11

[Benjamin Smedberg]

We have very little direct control over how Flash implements its fullscreen mode (or its crashiness). You're welcome to file an Adobe issue about that. This bug needs to be about what Firefox can/should do after the crash.

If you have specific or general steps to reproduce the crash you're seeing, please feel free to file that as a separate bug, with the crash IDs from about:crashes, and I'll see if we can get the crash on Adobe's radar.

Comment 12

[daf]

Benoit Girard made it sound that the problem is a consequence to the fix in bug #577494 I'll try to file a bug with adobe that links back here.

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to daf from comment #12)
> Benoit Girard made it sound that the problem is a consequence to the fix in
> bug #577494 I'll try to file a bug with adobe that links back here.

daf, did you hear back?

Comment 14

[Benoit Girard (:BenWa)]

IMHO we can and should fix the problem on our side, we have code to hook and hide the dock that was done part of moving flash OOP. So I think the fix should be made on our side. If we detect that flash crashes and we hid the dock on flash' behalf part of our OOP code then we need to unhide it.

Comment 15

[daf]

Was just cleaning up my inbox and noticed the needinfo. My apologies but i think I never did report the bug in adobe's bug tracker as for future followups I no longer have a current OSX machine or use Firefox on a daily basis so I'm unable to provide further feedback on this.

Once again, sorry for the late reply.

Comment 16

[alex_mayorga]

https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html