Comments on: Aha! A Clue

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:17:57 +0000

Obviously it is a better and more stable environment if you control both the hardware and software. I prefer Linux because it remains stable on almost anything you cobble together, and you don’t sign away your firstborn, or mortgage your house to get it.

If I could just convince my clients…

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 06:31:23 +0000

Hah! Yeah… I have an old G4 Titanium Powerbook. It works. 🙂 But… most of what I do is for people with Windoze! *shrug* So… I have little choice.

And… I was a Service Manager for an Apple Centre for a couple years… So I know the Mac’s weaknesses and problems too! Their biggest problem, is Apple. LOL Just like Windoze biggest is M$! I would NEVER, ever buy the first or even second release of anything for Apple. Apple think the Same as M$… people who buy them are not *customers*, they are beta testers! When the iPod first came out, there was a *secret* mod done almost every month for a while. The customers rarely noticed (except some problem suddenly went away), but us poor service people sure did!

On the whole though… A good Mac and OS-X is preferable to a Windoze PC. I only have Windoze on 1 PC, the other is Linux and very stable. 😉

By: Badtux

Badtux — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 06:16:40 +0000

I am *so* glad I’m using a Mac…

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:27:02 +0000

That’s what I installed yesterday, and it seems to have fixed the problem.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:20:23 +0000

Curiously enough, this morning I got Adobe’s auto-notification of the upgrade to Shockwave Flash 10.0r12, and allowed it to install. Reports on the forums are that this fixes the problem I was having, so that there should be no need for an occasional disable/re-enable. If it doesn’t fix it, I’ll let you know.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:56:13 +0000

Curiously Bryan… I’ve been testing various menu systems including some simple flash based ones in various browsers. I had trouble in FF 3.0.3 and went back to 3.0.1 then 2.0.x etc. The problems are difficult to reproduce exactly. So I did some research. It seems FF is still plagued with overflow error causing bugs (this was notorious in FF 1.x.x). It’s not as bad in v3, but still a problem. To get some consistent results in FF with even simple flash menu’s, I had to create a filter to turn off flash animation when FF was used. Not a perfect solution… but it seems to have helped. *sigh* This could be responsible for your troubles too. 🙂 It could also explain why I have very few crashes since installing Ad-block Plus, NoScript and FlashBlock, as anything with Flash or even GIF animation is disabled by default, and I just click on the place marker if I want to see the flash (such as a Youtube vid). 🙂 I find I don’t have any problems with Opera 9.6 (so far!)

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:00:52 +0000

I uses tabs as my default, but this problem was taking down everything.

I read about and commented on your problem, Moi. It is incredible the range of equipment that was left out of this update. You have to wonder what kind of testing they did, if any.

By: Moi

Moi — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:30:46 +0000

I also stay fairly vanilla with software, Bryan. I only have a few extensions on FF that I use – but one thing that isn’t an extension that works great is that I always open links in new tabs. That prevents a lot of FF crashing when leaving sites.

Don’t Download SP3!!!!! 😀

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:44:43 +0000

I may have found the problem – Adobe Flash. I upgraded to the latest version manually and it stopped happening.

I mistyped up above: I didn’t have Shockwave loaded before, only Flash. Adobe must have been using something that relied on a problem area in either FF or XP, and when it was fixed, everything died.

Given that I run fairly vanilla versions of software to avoid problems, and have never had any infection take hold on this box [knock on formica over chipboard] it’s a real PITA to have this sort of thing happen.

By: John B.

John B. — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:32:11 +0000

Click to leave… I meant.