Halp! BURNcast's Website Crashes My Browser!

Today on the BURNcast Facebook fan page I received a comment from Alex (remember him? he can be heard in the BURNcast audio podcast episode number 83 entitled "The Green Shoes Installation") who said "Your website crashes my browser and doesn't load properly. Dunno if I'm the only one but it's worth checking out."

Checking out indeed.  Below are two solutions. The first one is if you're viewing BURNcast on a Mac using Safari. The second one is if you're viewing this site with FireFox (either PC or Mac).

I'm going to start by saying because BURNcast is a video blog, it relies heavily on Flash. I'm not going to get into why Flash is evil here.  But I will say that much like rule #34: if there's a crash, it's because of Flash. Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to Web pages.

I can testify to this because I had the same issue in viewing BURNcast in Safari. Crash! Crash! Crash!  And worse: I sometimes would even have a kernel panic.

For Safari Users

When I asked Lecter about this, he told me to install ClickToFlash.

ClickToFlash is awesome. It resolved my issues immediately. It blocks all Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that enable you to view the content when you click on it.

With ClickToFlash, Flash won't load until specifically requested. This means your CPU usage will stay at normal levels when browsing the web, surfing will be snappy, battery life will improve, your laptop won't get as hot, and your fan won't kick in as frequently.

My most favorite feature of ClickToFlash is when you do click on a video in YouTube it will most likely play back in the high quality QuickTime format, not Flash, depending on its original encoding. And that alone makes viewing a video in ClickToFlash much nicer to view!

It's because YouTube also offers H.264 videos, which are used when viewing YouTube on the iPhone. With ClickToFlash, you get access to those same, higher quality videos.

For FireFox, Chrome and Flock Users

According to my stats, most of you folks are on a PC and along with that, theeeee number one browser used by my audience is Firefox. So here again is another workaround solution: Flashblock!

Flashblock does the same thing as ClickToFlash. Flashblock version 1.5.13 is designed to work only with Firefox 1.5 and newer, Netscape Navigator 9 and with Flock. You can even get Flashblock for Chrome.

For other browsers such as Seamonkey 2.0, and Netscape 9,  go here.

For older browsers such as Firefox 1.0.7, Mozilla Suite 1.7, Seamonkey 1.x, and Netscape 7/8,  go here.

And if you're trying to view BURNcast in IE, I really have to ask: WHY???