Ranting about Chrome, Flash Player, and LJ
For the last year or so, I've been using Chrome to access some social media sites such as Livejournal, Twitter, and Tumblr, because it worked better with them than the IE9 I got when I had to reconstruct my system after a hard drive crash a little over a year ago. For the most part, it's been working great, but that changed as far as Livejournal goes a few days ago.
Recently, Chrome's been updating their plug-ins, and that's where the problems have started- over the last few months, Google's been introducing a new interface for plug-ins, known as PPAPI, replacing the old NPAPI one, and as part of that process, there's a special version of Flash Player, known as "Pepper Flash" that's a joint venture between Adobe & Google customized for Chrome. However, this new version of Flash was unreliable, and was incompatible with the Real Player downloader, which was a major PITA. Yet, there was a work-around for this problem, which involved going to the plug-in page & disabling Pepper Flash, so that Chrome just used the standard Flash Player. Real Downloader worked just fine, & it was more reliable as well. Then a couple weeks ago, a series of new updates removed the standard player, forcing everyone to use Pepper Flash- annoying, as I had to download another program so I could download videos & audio clips off of Tumblr, & plug-in failures became more frequent.
Then a couple days ago, there was a whole new series of updates for Flash & Shockwave, and that's when things really started coming apart- all of a sudden, the Flash Player plug-in was constantly crashing, particularly if there was a lot of flash content on the page, and some pages, most notably the Livejournal home page & friends page, pretty much won't load at all, just sitting there for a long time, partially loaded, but in a state where one's unable to navigate, and attempting to load flash content without much success while maxing out my CPU. It's fracking annoying, and Google & Adobe need to get their heads out & fix it yesterday, because it's making Chrome a much less useful product.