Reports are coming in that the most recent version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser is not playing nicely with Flash game sites and games across the Internet.
Users are reporting all kinds of issues including extreme lag and rendering issues, that the mouse wheel stops working, the mouse cursor is lost, and that mouse clicks are delayed. Users are also reporting slow gameplay on Firefox 49.0.2 when they run Flash games in the browsers.
Mozilla enabled a new flag in Firefox that enabled asynchronous rendering for Flash in the new version of the web browser. It appears that this change is causing the issues that Firefox users are experiencing. The issue seems to be causing issues predominantly on Windows machines.
Affected games include many Facebook games that rely on Flash like Farmville 2 but also site navigation and of course gaming on sites like Friv.com.
The issue is quite serious as gaming is a popular activity not only on social networking sites like Facebook but also elsewhere.
It appears that that some developers have already started to display banners asking users to switch browsers to resolve flash game lag issues.
The fix
Firefox users who are experiencing issues playing Flash games in the web browser may do the following to correct the issue:
- Load about:config in the browser’s address bar.
- Confirm that you will be careful if the warning prompt is displayed.
- Search for dom.ipc.plugins.asyncdrawing.enabled.
- Double-click the preference to set it to false.
This disables asynchronous rendering of Flash content in Firefox and should resolve the issue.
Mozilla’s reaction
Mozilla plans to push a system add-on to Firefox 49.0.2 installations that disables the preference mentioned above. It will set the preference to false to correct the issue. It is unclear when the system add-on will be made available, but it could be as early as today.
It is likely that Mozilla will analyze the issues and try to correct them before enabling the preference again in the future.
One thing that is not that good is that the organization won’t fix the bug for 64-bit versions of Firefox for Windows until Firefox 50 gets released. Mozilla plans to release Firefox 50 on November 8, 2016.
It seems strange that Mozilla won’t fix the issue directly on 64-bit versions of Windows.
Now You: did you experience the issue in Firefox?