I keep seeing this claim all the time. Flash is a complete resource hog, i agree. But my mac/browser has never crashed because of Flash, since i bought this in 2007. Mind showing me a flash site that could crash my mac/browser?
Software changes over time (both the browser, and the flash plugin, and the flash code deployed on web pages) so asking someone to reference a particular site that will crash your particular browser won't help you understand what's going on. A better idea might be a few clever search strings:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=safari+crash+log+flash
Or, alternatively, you can look at the architecture of chrome and ask why they put tabs in separate processes, and why mozilla is also putting protection in place:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/03/mozilla-prev...
Apple isn't just making a wild conjecture when they say that Flash is the leading cause of browser crashes. They get stack traces sent to them by the crash reporting mechanism, and they get to count how many crashes come from what region of code. Drawn from sample sizes in the millions, this constitutes measurement.
And that is exactly what i am saying. I keep seeing all these people complaining about Flash , but no one has a proof that actually works.
As i mentioned before, Flash is a complete resource hog on the mac but no one here has a solid reproducible proof for "frequent crashes".
I choose not to believe in Apple's claims and numbers, as they are in open war with Adobe now on the issue. Opening up Flash on iPad and iPhone is lost business for app store(if you own an iPad/iPhone, you already know that currently there is no decent html5 application that work properly on these devices.)
http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byurl/Firefox/3.6....
That's not just Flash sites, that's all sites that crash Firefox, but on a quick skim I couldn't see any that didn't involve Flash.
[1] http://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/bringing-improved-support-f... [2] http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash