I hate flash as much as everyone, but I think the blame is misplaced wrt the Firefox situation.
On my system Firefox only locks up when I close a tab containing flash, never when flash is running. I have not had flash content crash in mid-run, let alone it bringing down the browser.
Sure, killing plugin-container.exe unlocks the browser, but it is an ugly hack at the most and not a fix.
Firefox devs have been plugging their ears and closing their eyes every time someone mentions this problem. They cannot expect users to believe it is the users' setup (or drivers, or plugins) that is the fault in every case when there are so many reports in the wild.
It also doesn't explain why other browsers have no such problem, nor why FF 3.6 did not have it (without resorting to lame excuses like "the flash version is different") either.
There are bad sectors on your brand new drive. You can count on it. You have to make the drive find them and map around them because it won't happen in the factory.
In the MFM/RLL days, SCSI disks were tested in the factory and came with a list of known bad C/H/S locations, and also keeps a list for bad sectors developed afterwards. I forgot whether the controller board had to skip those sectors during LBA translation or the OS had to not use them.
When IDE drives came out, the 'factory list' suddenly disappeared, and all drives seemingly came with 0 bad sectors out of the factory, but it was understood that the list was just hidden. They also introduced reserved sectors used to replace bad sectors developed afterwards so the user/OS always can always see/use the same capacity as long as the reserved area is not used up.
I believe this is still the case (test in the factory and hiding the list) as 2 new drives of the same model / batch can perform differently when tested, and sometimes there are consistent speed dips in the performance graph where you can tell something is going on.
That said, drives nowadays are more reliable, and I've not encountered a drive that develop bad sectors during the initial fill with random data, which I always do when I buy a new drive. I would not trust any brand-new drive which does it and for old drives that develops bad sectors I'll not use for anything important, even though the drive can reallocate them and might still run for years onwards.
Please work on something that will be actually useful, like those below. These are hard to do but it looks really bad when Mozilla ignore these for nearly 10 years to work on eye candy.
HTML5 <ruby> support
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33339
CSS3 writing-mode (vertical text)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145503
The translation above came from slashdot.jp comments posted right after the quake, before people realized the extent of the problem of the nuclear reactors, so people outside of the area hit directly were fairly positive that life would be back to normal soon.
The real picture only started to come out these few days, you can't blame the editors.
I bought a 4670 for an XP machine after an nvidia 6600gt card in it failed after a few years of use. It would bluescreen immediately whenever I bring up the TV viewing application that came with a TV card that I also had in the system.
I had to try multiple drivers, going back a few versions until I could find one that didn't bluescreen and ran relatively stable. But it still did little things wrongly sometimes that gets annoying. e.g. I ran 2 monitors with different resolutions on it and it insists on re-detecting them every time when waking up from sleep. But it got it wrong and swapped the resolutions once in a while!
The 6600gt never did any of those things. I did clean out the old drivers (including nvidia's) and reinstalled the drivers numerous times to isolate the bluescreen down to particular driver versions so it was not the old drivers messing the system up. So yes, I did have some negative feeling towards ATI's driver quality.
That said, I have a hd5870 in my current Win7 system that runs fine for the most part... Though I'd not say 100% perfect. e.g. h.264 video would glitch once in a while if I turn on hardware decoding acceleration (not always in the same spot and not if I go back and played the same scene so it is not the file nor the player), and sometimes a few scan lines are corrupted after waking up from sleep. I ran RAM test for the system and on the video card and they came up fine, so I'm not sure whether it is hardware or the drivers.
The 5870's performance is quite good and the glitches don't happen often enough to get in the way, at least not when I'm playing games, so I've been mostly satisfied with it, but I wouldn't rule out switching back to nvidia for my next upgrade if they come up with something fast, less heat and has a good bang-for-the-buck.
With your bare hands?!?