After updating Adobe Flash to the latest and greatest (version 11.3 at the time), Firefox froze whenever it tried to load a page that has Adobe Flash on it like Youtube. It took me sometime to discover that Adobe Flash has introduced the so-called Protected Mode. You can read all about it here. Apparently, Adobe is working on a fix but until then, I managed to extract the fix from here. Firefox took time to unfreeze and the only way to speed it up the unfreezing a was to kill the plugin-container.exe process which is used by Firefox to sandbox all Firefox plugins as well as Flash.
Apparently there are consequences to having Protected Mode in Flash but like most users, the hell with security if it breaks functionality. So to unfreeze Firefox, you will have to do the following: - In explorer, go to
C:\windows\system32\macromed\flash
- Edit (create if does not exist already) file mms.cfg
- add "ProtectedMode=0" without the quotes to the file. You will need admin rights to do that and save the file.
- That's it. Restart Firefox and Adobe Flash should load
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