Adrian Parr's Blog

This afternoon I stumbled across Kaushik Datta‘s blog post ‘Toyota’s Model Selector in Flex‘ where he mentions a new Flex site for Toyota. So I thought I’d take a look.

Initially it looks very nice, but after a short play with the sliders my Firefox browser crashed and displayed a weird error message. It was not an error message I have ever seen before.

Windows XP, Firefox 2.0.0.13 Error Message: Illegal Operation in Plugin

I restarted Firefox and tried it again, but the same thing happened. It is 100% repeatable.

So then I thought I’d give it give it a whirl in Internet Explorer (IE 7.0.5730.11) and, bingo, another new error message.

Windows XP, IE Error Message

The version of the Flash Player I have installed is WIN 9,0,115,0 (Debug player).

You can check your player version here.

And then finally the whole browser would die.

Take a look at the site and see if it crashes your browser too!

It also crashed Opera 9.24 on my Windows XP machine.

NOTE: It doesn’t crash in Firefox or Safari on my MacBook.

I’ve just discovered two lines of code that can crash Flash CS3 on both Mac and PC.

Save any other work (FLAs) you may have open before proceeding!

1. Create a new Flash File (ActionScript 3.0)
2. Put the following two lines of code on the first frame.
3. Test Movie

Bingo!

You can download the FLA from here.

UPDATE 14/08/09: It doesn’t crash in Flash CS4, instead it gives you the following error message …

ArgumentError: Error #2012: TextSnapshot class cannot be instantiated.
at Untitled_fla::MainTimeline/frame1()