Yep and in fact Amazon has even publicly stated that they believe a national system is the reasonable way to go.

http://www.boe.ca.gov/members/runner/newsreleases/Amazon_Letter_to_Senator_Runner.pdf

In particular near the end:

"A national resolution, involving tax simplification evenhandedly applied, is the legally-permissible path for states to follow."

I've been running Firefox on 6 machines running a combination of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 for the last 5 years. The flash plugin is installed, and I frequently browse sites that use Flash heavily for web galleries. The number of times Firefox has crashed on me in those 5 years I can count on one hand (actually I think its less than 3). My anecdotal evidence is as good yours and at least to me hints that perhaps something else wrong with your set up.

Liquid rescale is an implementation of the Seam Carving technology which was incorporated into Photoshop CS4 as a feature titled Content Aware Scale.

This new feature comes from an algorithm titled PatchMatch which was presented at SIGGRAPH 2009:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/index.php