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Both my wife and I have 12.04LTS on our desktop PCs. Last Saturday a routine apt-get upgrade upgraded us from Firefox 42.0 to Firefox 43.0. The new version crashes consistently if you try to play and video on YouTube within a few seconds and crashes on other sites too, to the point where it's unusable.

I searched around on the Web and as a result tried various tweaks to about:config but without success.

In the end we have downgraded to 42.0 by grabbing the tarball from Mozilla and installing it in /opt but I'm fully aware that this is a less than optimal position to be in as we're now stuck on an old release.

Given that this happened to both of us, and our set ups are not identical, I'm surprised other people aren't having problems too as it can't be just us but my Google Foo seems weak. Hence my post here.

Has anyone got any ideas as to why we're having problems? TIA

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  • Hi There.. Close firefox, open up terminal and type sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-* and then see. If it still crashes, give a system restart and try again.
    – AzkerM
    Dec 22, 2015 at 15:12
  • So, now you have two separate versions, and the 42 works fine, while the 43 crashes? Try launching the 43 with firefox -safe-mode to see if that works. If it still crashes, the problem is definitely the Firefox, so you can report a bug with the mark regression — I think regression, and especially crashes, would have a high priority, so you can expect it would be fixed fast.
    – Hi-Angel
    Dec 22, 2015 at 16:53
  • @AzkerM - 12.04 only includes gstreamer 0.10 (which I do have installed). Would it be worth looking for a PPA? @Hi-Angel - yup, crashes in safe mode too. Immediately if I have a page open which needs flashplayer. When I launched it that way I saw the error TNS filter order 20 is greater than maximum 12. which I suspecting may be significant. Dec 23, 2015 at 20:28
  • OK, I've installed gstreamer1.0 from ppa:gstreamer-developers/ppa but Firefox still crashes in safe mode. The error on the terminal varies. For the previous page with video I now get I/SampleTable( 6522): There are reordered frames present. and for YouTube I get: [h264 @ 0x7fb33a281800] AVC: nal size 0 [h264 @ 0x7fb33a281800] AVC: nal size 0 [h264 @ 0x7fb33a281800] no frame! Dec 23, 2015 at 20:48
  • (Is it me or is Markdown not working properly!?) Dec 23, 2015 at 20:49

1 Answer 1

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A friend of mine passed this information over to me.

  1. Launch Firefox & type about:config on the address bar, enter.
  2. Search for media.fragmented-mp4.enabled and set the valut to false

He did not say, why changing this would work.

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  • Seems to have fixed it for me, too, but wonder what it does...! Jan 27, 2016 at 11:49
  • I am running Firefox 44.02 on 32 bit 12.04. I have the same problem: crash at html5 video. Unfortunately, in my Firefox there is no "media.fragmented-mp4.enabled" in about:config.
    – hako
    Mar 2, 2016 at 5:40

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