Lets talk about flash...

[Maximilian]

...how did they screw this up so badly?

I remember when youtube first showed up and flash was already really popular (as it still is) and everything generally worked fine. Flash was a bit of a hog but it worked, and if it didn't a simple refresh sorted it out. As of today though im wary as hell of even trying to skip through a video in case the "an error has occurred" crap shows up, refresh dosent do squat, just starts the vid back when it originally crashed and it dosent play from that point on, using another browser like IE dosent fix it... Sometimes a video will load till about halfway and then just stop.

This thread isnt really a search for solutions because ive given up, hopefully youtube accelerates their html5 rollout for all videos asap, its more of a wtf happened to flash thread. Why is it so garbage? Why does it crash so much? As a wannabe software developer im starting to appreciate the massive complexity in developing stuff but they've had years to make this shit work and its gone from acceptable to pretty damn awful, aren't things meant to get better over time?! No wonder apple dosent want this thing on the iphone.

 

[lxskllr]

My guess is patch after patch degrades performance and adds complexity. If you remove all security concerns, it makes the software easier to deal with, and you can hack around issues. Security requires more precision.

I assume you're in the html5 trial? I guess just wait it out. GNU/Linux has some Flash replacements, but they're buggy and incomplete. I have the proprietary plugin on my system :^(

 

[Maximilian]

Yeah, the trial dosent work for all vids yet though unfortunately, quite a lot are still played using flash.

 

[sm625]

Maybe its just youtube? I notice the long videos seem to buffer more than the short videos, like maybe the buffering is % based; ie the longer the video the more gets buffered, so less problems.

 

[Quantos]

I've been having a lot of these issues with Flash and Chrome as well. This has been so bad that it's driven me to give Firefox a try. It does seem to be more stable with Youtube and Flash so far...

 

[chadashcroft22]

I've been having a lot of these issues with Flash and Chrome as well. This has been so bad that it's driven me to give Firefox a try. It does seem to be more stable with Youtube and Flash so far...

http://www.lockergnome.com/media/2012/01/20/how-to-fix-shockwave-flash-crashes-in-google-chrome/

Looks like chrome will load 2 versions of flash if you have the stand alone version on your system as well. I had tons of crashes in my chrome and I just decided to get rid of the stand alone one because every flash update it will turn itself back on again even if you turn it off .

 

[Dude111]

...how did they screw this up so badly?

Because they sold it to ADOBE!