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Flash Player Corrupts Firefox

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  • 1 has this problem
  • 10 views
  • Last reply by user363021

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Some time last month Adobe updated Flash Player. Since then, with the exception of IE11, my browsers including Firefox do not display all sites in full. Some do not download at all but only result in an empty window. Firefox behaves this way even with the recent update it applied yesterday. This is a Windows 7 64-bit system. On certain pages I use regularly images do not show. Where the images serve as links I have to read fine print under them to keep them straight since I only see placeholders for the images. Lately, if that is the answer, I am thinking of reverting back to an earlier Flash Player. Is anyone having these problems?

Some time last month Adobe updated Flash Player. Since then, with the exception of IE11, my browsers including Firefox do not display all sites in full. Some do not download at all but only result in an empty window. Firefox behaves this way even with the recent update it applied yesterday. This is a Windows 7 64-bit system. On certain pages I use regularly images do not show. Where the images serve as links I have to read fine print under them to keep them straight since I only see placeholders for the images. Lately, if that is the answer, I am thinking of reverting back to an earlier Flash Player. Is anyone having these problems?

Modified by user363021

All Replies (20)

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Pj, I got a "page load error" error message on your YouTube link. The page says "Secure Connection Failed." This is SeaMonkey. Unless there is some plugin or addon that I cannot remove, there should be no Flash Player on this system now, though still I see garbage. No, Page Info does not show the image. In fact it leads to a page with the same error messages.

Modified by user363021

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What image related messages do you see in the Web Console?

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Not much of anything. Here is a screenshot. Hold on! I just discovered the button that brings up other information. I cannot capture it all; but I can copy the information. My image does not match the video:

"" ""

I wish I knew how to export this information to a file. Somehow I lost what caught my attention. This time I am in Firefox.

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cor-el, I am afraid what I copied onto this page does not appear. I am going to have to explore this console thing again. Here is a report that I was able to take from the same page as SeaMonkey shows it. Sorry I could not upload it as an image file.

Nu Html Checker This tool is an ongoing experiment in better HTML checking, and its behavior remains subject to change Showing results for https://hp.tb.ask.com/tbask/index.html Checker Input Show source outline image report Check by https://hp.tb.ask.com/tbask/index.html Use the Message Filtering button below to hide/show particular messages, and to see total counts of errors and warnings. Message Filtering Warning Consider adding a lang attribute to the html start tag to declare the language of this document. From line 4, column 23; to line 5, column 30 E 8]>↩ ↩

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In Firefox, I am not sure if this Console is of much use. In the bottom line menu starting with Errors, I can pull up nothing under all those options.

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Okay, you tried to retrieve one of the little images used on the Ask page --

https://ak.staticimgfarm.com/images/webtooltab/chiclets/youtube.png

-- and

troothteller said

Pj, I got a "page load error" error message on your YouTube link. The page says "Secure Connection Failed."

That isn't a Flash-related issue.

What is the explanation given on the error page for the failure, if any?

Does anything in the relevant article help: Secure connection failed and Firefox did not connect?

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The problem here might be that I am getting just text without the placeholders. Right now I have the "Ask" icon highlighted. Under the dropdown menu for CSS, I show the following, if this copies:

Unknown pseudo-class or pseudo-element ‘-webkit-input-placeholder’. Ruleset ignored due to bad selector. index.html:1:233 Unknown pseudo-class or pseudo-element ‘-ms-input-placeholder’. Ruleset ignored due to bad selector. index.html:1:312 Unknown pseudo-class or pseudo-element ‘-ms-input-placeholder’. Ruleset ignored due to bad selector. index.html:1:370 Expected ‘none’, URL, or filter function but found ‘alpha(’. Error in parsing value for ‘filter’. Declaration dropped. index.html:1:125 Stylesheets without CSSOM changes reparsed to check for errors. Refresh the page to also see errors from stylesheets changed from CSSOM and from style attributes.

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Hi troothteller, the buttons below the bar in your screenshot show text because the images did not load. What we need to help you figure out is why your Firefox can't retrieve those images. The best clue so far is that Firefox can't form a secure connection to the server. Could you reply to my message about that:

jscher2000 said

Okay, you tried to retrieve one of the little images used on the Ask page -- https://ak.staticimgfarm.com/images/webtooltab/chiclets/youtube.png -- and troothteller said
Pj, I got a "page load error" error message on your YouTube link. The page says "Secure Connection Failed."

That isn't a Flash-related issue.

What is the explanation given on the error page for the failure, if any?

Does anything in the relevant article help: Secure connection failed and Firefox did not connect?

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I think I demonstrated that I do not know how to use this Console. What I last posted I "dug" for. I do not have Avast, AVG or ESET. The following message appears under Warnings after highlighting the words "Go To Gmail.":

The Application Cache API (AppCache) is deprecated and will be removed at a future date. Please consider using ServiceWorker for offline support.

Modified by user363021

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Could you try https://ak.staticimgfarm.com/images/webtooltab/chiclets/youtube.png and copy/paste the full text below the "Secure Connection Failed" heading into a reply.

Also, is Ask your preferred search site or was this introduced to your system unintentionally and you would just as well get rid of Ask? Maybe this was a "ride-along" with the last Flash update; I hadn't thought of that connection before.

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Ask is my preferred Search engine as I have that page saved to Favorites or otherwise bookmarked. That link you just provided leads to a page which says, "Page Load Error" and "Secure Connection Failed." This is SeaMonkey. Switching to Firefox just to confirm, the same happens there.

Modified by user363021

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Usually the Secure Connection Failed page has more details about the problem. Not in this case? Just the title?

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To learn more there is a link that opens to one of your support pages, "What do the security warning codes mean?" The rest of the page, and a blurb about reporting errors to help Mozilla block malicious sites: The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

  • The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
  • Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
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troothteller said

The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

I think this indicates that the server or an intermediary outside of Firefox sent back word that the connection was being terminated.

Do you have any unusual connection settings? You can check that here:

  • Windows: "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Options
  • Mac: "3-bar" menu button (or Firefox menu) > Preferences
  • Linux: "3-bar" menu button (or Edit menu) > Preferences
  • Any system: type or paste about:preferences into the address bar and press Enter/Return to load it

In the search box at the top of the page, type proxy and Firefox should filter to the "Settings" button, which you can click.

The default of "Use system proxy settings" piggybacks on your Windows/IE "LAN" setting. "Auto-detect" can lead to a flaky connection. You may want to try "No proxy".

Any difference?

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I am not using a proxy and will upload a screenshot of this since it looks strange. Under Certificates what should I have? Presently I have Ask you every time with checked Query OCSP responder servers to confirm the current validity of certificates. You asked about unusual connection settings, right? Let me upload a diagram of my network. My laser all-in-one is connected to a router that only serves as a access point, to which anything connected would not appear on a Network map.

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Hi troothteller, try "No Proxy" as your connection setting to see whether that has any effect.

I don't understand your question about Certificates. Firefox starts with a set of built-in trusted root certificates, and some collects validated certificates as you browse. Therefore, the list will look different for each user pretty quickly. If you think Firefox's certificates file might have become corrupted, you can delete the file and have Firefox start a new one. The steps are in this article: What do the security warning codes mean? in the "Corrupted certificate store" section.

Your network diagram mentions a VPN. Are you using a VPN when you have this problem?

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Whoops! That is actually a Linksys RT31P2, a wired router Vonage used to give away free to its customers if you used Vonage earlier. I just made that change to "No Proxy." After I close out I will delete that file and reopen Firefox to test it on that page.

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Whoa Ho! We now have images on that page. If I could guess which step solved it, I would guess it was some issue with certificates. Thanks. Maybe this will work similarly in SeaMonkey, which corrupts that page too. As far as the Chromium browsers I have, Chrome and Torch, I will have to investigate how. Thanks again! Somewhere in the last step we solved this one. Now, I must correct my mistake. I was so busy fooling around with the certificate file, backing it up to a certain place, that I forgot to delete it from the Profile. So, it was the the resetting to "No Proxy" that fixed the problem. Now, I still have the problem with the Chromium browsers and not with IE11. However, both those browsers work off IE11's settings. So, this is a further challenge.

Modified by user363021

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I am grateful for this forum and its contributors. Without the responses I would not have known to check Proxy settings in either Firefox or SeaMonkey, where the solution was to fix both browsers. As for the Chromium browsers, they have had ongoing problems in this image area. None of the fixes have worked; so I may have to live with it for a while. Meanwhile, for the corresponding problem in SeaMonkey, once a Mozilla project, I had a thread there which ended with someone making such an abusive post that a moderator had to lock the thread. I did the best I could to address that abusive post; but I hope those who lead SeaMonkey will expel that member from the forum. The post was a response to my sharing the solution, making the change to the proxy setting.

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It's very odd that "Use system proxy settings" -- which I think would normally have Firefox use the same routing as Internet Explorer -- does not work for you. Maybe someday we'll discover the extra little wrinkle that explains it.

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