Shockwave Flash Crashed Google Chrome
Fixing the “Shockwave Flash has crashed Google Chrome” error
Google Chrome outperformed its competitors and came in first place in the browser ranking. All this is fun, but Google does not want to solve the painful problems of its child.
A rather unpleasant mistake that happens at the most inopportune moment, especially when a bunch of tabs are open and there is not the slightest desire to restart the browser. Your agony is over!
- A short excursion into the heart of the problem
- How to fix Shockwave Flash failure in two clicks
- Uninstalling and reinstalling Adobe Flash Player
- How to turn off Flash Player hardware acceleration
- What else can I try?
A short excursion into the essence of the problem
Why Chrome again? What’s wrong with it? In fact, there is no problem if you only use Google Chrome (maybe the developers wanted to get rid of competitors in this clever way?). But many people use several browsers at once for different purposes. For example, I use Opera, occasionally Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox at the same time.
Initially, Google Chrome was attractive for many people because it had a built-in flash player that worked “by default”, i.e. no additional plug-ins had to be installed. But other browsers didn’t have that feature, so you had to install Adobe Flash Player separately.
And the result is a mess: Google Chrome connects all the plug-ins on startup: its own, and installed in the system, and all the versions that will find. What a mess… You get an error message: “Shockwave Flash has crashed Google Chrome” and a warning message pops up
In current versions of chrome developers have already eliminated the problem, and the article was written on version 22.0.1229.94.
How to fix a Shockwave Flash crash in two clicks
You can watch a video or read a detailed article
Well, we don’t have to get used to it, we do it all by hand, thankfully it’s not hard at all. To solve the problem, we will simply disable unnecessary Shockwave Flash modules, leaving only one. To do this, we need to go into the settings of plugins. You can do it via the menu or just paste into the address bar of your browser: chrome://plugins
To get there through the menu, go to “Settings -> Show advanced settings -> Content settings -> Disable individual modules…”.
There may be two or more Shockwave Flash modules of different versions in use. One of them will be built into Google Chrome, and the rest will be system modules. It is easy to determine this: if the path of module files starts at “C:\Windows\…”, then it is a separately installed plug-in, and if “C:\Users\…”, then it is built into Chrome. As you can see in the picture they are different versions. This is because the built-in plugin is updated only with the program and the external one is updated independently and quite often.
We need to disable all unnecessary modules and leave only one. To do this, click “Disable” on each unnecessary module. I recommend you try to disable external modules, restart your browser and watch how the browser behaves. If you failed to fix the failure, try doing the opposite, i.e. enable the latest version of the external module and disable the internal one.
UPDATE 14.05.2015: After updating to version 42, some old extensions are no longer supported, including the external player. Therefore, to make everything work you need to either enable the built-in module, or do as instructed. Namely: Type in the address bar: chrome://flags/#enable-npapi and click “Enable” for NPAPI extensions.
Uninstalling and reinstalling Adobe Flash Player
If you can’t beat the problem with the previous method, try to remove the external Adobe Flash Player plugin altogether. To do this, close all browsers, go to “Control Panel -> Uninstall Programs” in Windows 7/10 and remove the Adobe Flash Player Plugin.
If you still need it for other browsers, after uninstalling it, install the latest version again from Adobe’s website https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/?loc=ru. Then try the different modules again, alternating between them.
How to disable Flash Player hardware acceleration
Another possible problem that can cause Flash Player to glitch could be the hardware acceleration of Flash, which is enabled by default. This can cause video to play with artifacts, and the plugin to freeze. In some cases, disabling hardware acceleration solves this problem.
The first way. To do this, open any site with Flash, right-click on any Flash element and select “Options”:
Then go to the first tab and uncheck “Enable hardware acceleration”.
The second way. Concludes in running chrome with hardware acceleration already disabled. To do this, you need to add a special parameter to start the program: click on the Google Chrome shortcut and select “Properties” and on the tab “Shortcut” go to the end of the line and add the text: -disable-accelerated-video
What else can I try?
Try uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome. Don’t lose your bookmarks when reinstalling!
The cause of Shockwave Flash failure may be a “sandbox” execution of plugins. I will not go into details of what this is, just if nothing helped, then try adding the -disable-flash-sandbox parameter to the Chromium startup line.
For example, if you add both of the parameters I mentioned above, the startup string looks something like this:
“C:\Users\jc\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” -disable-accelerated-video -disable-flash-sandbox