[Digitalis]

I admit this is a bit of a rant...

I use Mozilla Firefox and I also use flash which means I have to put up with occasional stuttering and the occasional outright CTD caused by Adobe flash. My android tablet PC works with flash without any of these issues, and it has only a fraction of the computing power of my desktop computer. I have also been having some issues with Nik software and versions of Adobe photoshop, now this I can understand Nik software is third party. However in this case I suspect the problem is Adobe software becoming a voracious resource hog - after working on several files from my IQ180 and Leica S2 even with the considerable amount of RAM and SSD scratch disk space the programs just chews through resources. I just wish that Adobe would pay attention to their users and create some networking infrastructure in Lightroom or Photoshop to allow users like me to use a Render farm, or at least make use of the $900 videocard in my PC.

I'm actually rather surprised NVIDIA or AMD haven't come up with a Video card with photography related features capabilities* that can be exploited by software makers - Video software and CGI animation packages make heavy use of installed videocards. Most GPU's these days can process well over 150 of Gb of data per second and process trillions of pixels in a matter of seconds.

/rant.

*beyond support for displayport and advanced 14 bit LUT - which is really only of use for bleeding edge monitors that support it.

[Parallax]

The issue with Flash and Firefox may be a Firefox issue. I have experienced the same thing many times, A few weeks ago, Java just quit working with Firefox. Nothing I did resolved the issue so I switched to Chrome. There have been no issues with Flash or Java since.

[mrNewt]

Yep, lately, Firefox is been buggy a little... Chrome seems to be taking over slowly, slowly.

[Parallax]

I haven't used Firefox in a few weeks. I just now tried to use it just to see if anything has changed. Well, it's changed alright. It will now only start in safe mode. It absolutely refuses to start normally; all I get is the "Firefox has crashed....." dialog.
I guess my debate as to whether to uninstall it or not is now over.

[Anvh]

There are settings to manage the amount of resources that are used. If it uses too much then you must lower those numbers. It's that simple right?

For flash i've no words for but there are no alternatives... well microsoft silverlight maybe?

I'm actually rather surprised NVIDIA or AMD haven't come up with a Video card with photography related features capabilities* that can be exploited by software makers - Video software and CGI animation packages make heavy use of installed videocards. Most GPU's these days can process well over 150 of Gb of data per second and process trillions of pixels in a matter of seconds.

You're pointing the finger at the wrong ones here.
AMD and Nvidia support openCL and the later has CUDA, all instructions set for GPGPU.
Now it's the task of the software to support that and make use of it.

Since CS4 or CS5 more and more function and filters make use of them and that number increase with each new generation.

[Not a Number]

The issue with Flash and Firefox may be a Firefox issue. I have experienced the same thing many times, A few weeks ago, Java just quit working with Firefox. Nothing I did resolved the issue so I switched to Chrome. There have been no issues with Flash or Java since.

Not to long ago there were some serious security issues with Java. Later versions of Firefox will automatically disable the versions of Java that are vulnerable. Oracle sent out a security alert advising users to disable Java for all browsers be it Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari. If you updated FireFox without updated Java, Java will be disabled. And if you update Java to the "fixed" version (it merely asks if you want to run the Java app every time) you still have to manually enable Java in Firefox.

[Parallax]

Thanks!