Flash on Vista: an example of what will happen often with ActiveX

Adobe engineers did a simple error while implementing their out-of-process COM server. Nothing horrible, nothing that hinders security, it's just slight induced slowness.

When you create a COM server, you try to reuse it when different clients request it. It reduces the number of process start-up. The way it's done is that when the final Release() call is done on your last object, you wait a little before exiting the process just in case someone creates an object of the same type a few seconds later.

But on IE7 on Vista, each time you navigate on web pages that contains Flash objects, the process gets killed and started. There's nothing to do except using IE7 x64 so Flash objects don't load at all. :)

Since Microsoft wants ISVs to (finally) implement security with privilege separation by using different processes, many of them will have to create out-of-process COM server. I hope they'll do their homework.

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I must not be too harsh, maybe they did this behaviour for some security reasons unknown to me.