How to stop Shockwave Flash from crashing Google Chrome – Battle of the Plugins and extensions

If your Google Chrome browser crashes a lot, then this article is for you.

As you may be aware, Abode Flash has been blocked in both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome Browsers since Monday July 13^th 2015 as reported in my blog article entitled “Mozilla Blocks Adobe Flash on @Firefox - How to watch Videos without Adobe Flash as Alternatives to Flash exist”. 

If you use Adobe Flash mainly for watching videos, you have alternatives as listed in that article. But if you're just a visitor of websites, you'll still need Adobe Flash and its equally annoying companion Shockwave.

I say annoying as Shockwave crashes a lot, forcing me to restart my Dell Latitude D520 Laptop. No, this isn’t me deliberately crashing Google Chrome by typing in a special string of symbols as explained in my blog article entitled “How Andris Atteka’s 16 Character String crashes Google Chrome – Pranks galore until Google fixes this problem”.

 It seemed to occur whenever I loaded a lot of Webpage from my blog My Thoughts on Technology and Jamaica, making me think back then that it was related due to exceeding my 2GB of installed RAM Memory.

To find temporary relief, I used to drift over to Mozilla Firefox whenever Google Chrome crashed as pointed out in my Geezam blog article entitled “How to reset the default Search Engine in Mozilla Firefox”.

I've expanded the use of Virtual Memory and freed up my Hard-drive space on my 80 GB Hard-drive and it still crashes. This article is thus intended to be a fix for this problem, which I now realize is not related to memory.  It's Shockwave's dual personality.

How to stop Shockwave Flash from crashing Google Chrome – Battle of the Plugins and extensions

What's happening is that I have two copies of Shockwave, the powerhouse that powers Adobe Flash as pointed out in the article “How to stop Shockwave Flash crashing in Google Chrome: make sure you have only one plug-in enabled”, published May 12 2015 by Paul Monckton, PC Advisor.

It is built into Google Chrome; the other was installed in your computers that Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer can use it. This means that when Google Chrome is running, there are actually two (2) versions of Adobe Shockwave running and a Adobe Flash application can choose to use either one of them.

The Crashes occur due to conflicts between the vision of Google Shockwave Flash built into Google Chrome and the installed versions of Shockwave Flash within your computer. So here’s how you fix this problem:

Type about:plugins in the address bar of a Google Chrome Tab to access Google plugin Configurations. You'll see a page as shown below listing all you active plugins.

Look to see if you have more than one version of Adobe Flash Player or Shockwave Flash running. Then determine where the Shockwave Flash is located, click on Details in the upper right hand corner to open up details.

If the address says something sting like “C://”, that's a desktop version of Shockwave Flash.

If you see the desktop versions, merely click the disable button beside it to disable it. Then restart your browser and just like that the problem is gone. If you still have the problem, you'll need to upgrade your Google Chrome Browser with the latest version.

You can also uninstall and install the latest version of Shockwave Flash as well as try disabling some of the other extension by going to chrome://settings, and click on Extensions on the left as explained in the article “Stop the Shockwave Flash Chrome crash”, published Nov 7, 2013 by Lincoln Spector, PCWorld. 

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