SubscribeFlash Ads Locking Up Firefox
Posted on Nov 30, 2007 under Internet Tips |Firefox has been locking up on me lately. I get to a point in my day where I have more than 8 tabs open and it just freezes. I can’t switch to another window or another tab in Firefox.
One of my tabs is usually Yahoo Mail since I like to check my email throughout the day. I noticed Yahoo pages serve a lot of animated Flash ads and they were animating very slowly. I found these ads have been the culprit in slowing Firefox as well as my machine down quite a bit.
So what do I do? Uninstall Flash and suffer when I need it to play games or whatever? Well I found a workaround, albeit it’s not practical. Everytime one of these ads load and start locking up things, I can right-click on the Flash ad and select Quality > Low.
Doing this has made makes problem with Firefox go away immediately. However, I have to do this each time the problematic ad loads. Annoying, but a workaround for now.
by Sean, on January 29 2008 @ 6:11 pm
I’d like to point out that the best way to cut out ads like that is to keep them from loading in the first place. There’s a handy little Firefox extension called “Adblock Plus” that will detect ads and keep those elements from loading in a webpage. Everything else displays just fine, though. The extension script uses a list of known ad servers, which can be referenced to the creator’s site, where a very large list is maintained, or you can install Adblock without it, and only filter the ads you want to by right-clicking on the (gif) or using the adblock interface (flash).
Here’s the Firefox extension link:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
–Sean