Recently, I encountered what has to be the most annoying Google Chrome bug I have ever come across – EVER. My browser would freeze up and Flash would die without fail every fifteen minutes to one hour. It was frustrating and it made it tough to get things done. I tried all of the usual remedies: banging my fist on the keyboard, swearing at my computer, reinstalling Chrome – nothing worked.

It turns out that the problem was that somewhere along the way I had ended up with multiple instances of Flash in my browser plug-ins – and because of the way that Chrome handles Flash, it was not possible to simply uninstall one of the instances.

Here’s what I did to fix it.

Click the wrench on the top right of the screen -> Options -> Under the Hood -> Privacy: Content Settings -> Plug-ins: Disable individual plug-ins

Now you are where you need to be. Flash is up the top and it will tell you how many Flash files there are: 1, 2, 3, etc. You just can’t see them all. Click Details at the top right and you get a detailed list. Disable all but the most recent instance of Shockwave Flash – make sure that there is only one of them and curse Google for making this process much more difficult than it needs to be.