All my browsers freeze. (Safari, Firefox, and Opera)

[williamtracy]

Today I was on Safari just surfing the web and it froze up with the spinny ball. I figured no big deal, it happens every now and again, I'll just reopen it. I do and I start surfing again. It freezes again about 2 minutes later. I try it once more with the same result. Finally I switch to Firefox and figure something must of happened to Safari.
I start using Firefox and the same exact thing happens over and over. I now switch to Opera (which I never use and don't even know why I have) just to check, and sure enough it has the same problem. All of my other programs are working fine and experiencing no freeze ups whatsoever. Then I restart the computer hoping this will fix it. Nope, same problem.
I have no idea what to do as I've never experienced any problem like this at all in my 2 years using a mac. I haven't done anything online today out of the ordinary and haven't been to any suspect sites in the recent past. I tried using finder to look up any recently modified or created files and see if they looked fishy, but I really had no idea what I was looking for.
This is my first time on the site and hopefully somebody can help me along through my problem, it would be greatly appreciated I look forward to coming back and contributing to this great site once I can finally stay on the internet for more than 2 minutes!

[gigatexel]

Strangely, I just started having the same problem. I use firefox instead of safari, but I also get the spinny ball. What hardware are you running? I have a MacBook Pro C2D 2.33. Do you remember what websites you were visiting? I remember most specifically espn.com. It may be some bad code on an advertisement that crashes browsers.

[williamtracy]

I've found a thread on another Mac forum with easily another 200 people with the same problem and it's been found to have in fact been espn.com. The simplest fix at the moment seems to be to restart and never go to espn. Once you do it crashes your broswer and then any other flash intensive site you go to will also crash, requiring you to reset the entire process again by restarting the computer. There are other more complicated fixes, but espn must surely be working on a fix, and so I'd assume in a day or two the problem should be solved.

[Nanman]

I've encountered this same problem at at least a dozen sites -- including ESPN. No matter where I go, I can hit 5-8 sites before everything freezes and I get the spinny ball.

Anyone know what the fix is -- even if it's complicated?

[Satcomer]

Yes. Remove the Flash plugin with the Flash uninstaller. This is the problem because I can visit any of these sites without any problem on my G5 PPC or Intel Mac Book Pro and I didn't install Flash (in Leopard). also you can read this MacFixIt article on how to get Flash out.