[kleiba]

I experience regular "gray outs" on Ubuntu with FF hogging so many resources that eventually the only thing that works is killing it. This happens to me both on a 5 year old desktop as well as on old Lenovo Thinkpad (X2002s). However, I believe flashplayer to be the culprit as I often have quite a few youtube tabs open -- obviously never more than one playing though.

[StudentStuff]

Why are you using Flash Player for Youtube? I've gone nearly 4 years since installing Flash on any machine, its pretty well unnecessary today. If you want to reduce performance though, using Flash is one way of going about it.

[Narishma]

Depends on your hardware and drivers. On a couple of my older machines the Flash plugin is the only way I can get hardware accelerated video decoding.