Lately Firefox crashes, crashes, and crashes some more. I strongly suspect it’s Myspace allowing bad Flash ads through. I never liked Flash, for ten years now, simply because it’s controlled by one company. But that’s another rant. Bottom line: Flash ads crash browsers, hog the CPU and have a history of being unsafe, no thanks. I would much rather see .GIF animation ads, I don’t block those.

In the beginning Myspace was usable. But once the Flash ads got out of control I had to install the Flashblock plugin for Firefox. The problem with Flashblock, sometimes it doesn’t work! Example: “Bud Light Party Cruise” ad obliterates Firefox, Flashblock can’t block it, Firefox freezes and at that point I have to Ctrl-Alt-Del and kill Firefox. Good thing Firefox has a session saver. Firefox allows me to disable Java, I should be able to disable Flash too. Maybe it’s time I give Opera another look.

At the same time I’m looking at Virb.com, another social network. One of my favorite musicians (Deceptikon) recommends Virb. Virb is similar to Myspace but it’s more about art/music/photography. And the design is clean, pages load fast, I suspect the code is tidy too. Unlike Myspace which is an amateurish mess, did you ever notice each profile page loads three CSS files, on top of all the layouts people add themselves? Sloppy code wastes everyone’s time: wasted bandwidth and CPU.