It does NOT make it any less of a problem, and unfortunately I imagine that it does cost Firefox some users - perhaps even loyal ones.Desperate measures to solve a festering market-share debacle?

Using the usually successful 'follow the money' trail to the culprit would seem to support this conclusion.

It seems clear that IF it is going to get fixed, it will need to be on the Firefox team as I imagine that Adobe responds to money (even while providing a 'free' plugin) and clearly both Microsoft and Google have money to burn and our much loved Mozilla Firefox does not. I do not want to lose them by moving to another browser, OR by running FF in safe mode. Further, there are plugins that I use that have no equivalents in the other browsers. I love Firefox (most of the time) and certainly it stands heads and shoulders above IE and Chrome (in my opinion and the way that I use a browser). maybe it is plugins that we use that throw things into the mix and cause the crashes (sometimes true) as there have been a couple of times over the years that I have been able to open in safe mode and not crash. Given this has happened over years - at least since about 4.0 (and yes FF seems headed towards 30), it SEEMS that it is something integral within FF that keeps tripping up Adobe, and then the FF team does a tweak or something changes and then everything works fine again for a while. Therefore, for some reason, Firefox and Adobe do NOT play well together. I know because I have to switch to them when FF is crashing just to get to the support at either Adobe OR Firefox. Problematically, while Shockwave crashes in Firefox, it rarely crashes in IE or Chrome. Unfortunately, even that doesn't work sometimes (and it seems like we go through this problem every few months after an FF update). There is even an uninstaller to download. I HAVE complained to Adobe and they Do have 'solutions' - usually to uninstall Adobe shockwave/flash and reinstall, and if that doesn't work to uninstall and reinstall an older version.

Adobe shockwave crashing chrome