So, I’ve been having trouble for a few months visiting certain Flash based sites or sites that contain Flash ads in them. I’d say that that I experienced “problems” with approximately 5% of the sites I’ve visited. I’ll define “problems” as a total, complete crash more commonly known as a “black screen of death.” At first I thought that the problem was due to my upgrading of OS X from Tiger to Leopard back at the beginning of November, rather than performing a clean install as I should have done. I could live with the occasional crashes (a blank screen and force reboot) until I had time to do a clean install of Leopard.

Well, the day came in February and I backed up my Mac with Time Machine, Super Duper! and manually onto my Firewire drive, did a clean install of Leopard and then tweaked my system to a point where I was happy with it. My days of my iMac (it’s a 24″ inch from the fall of 2006) hanging when shutting down instantly disappeared (What, a computer that shuts down without having to hold the power button to reset it?!).

But, one annoying quirk remained… Sudden system crashes that would happen when I visited certain Flash based sites. Now, I’ve been a fan of the website maintained by the U.S. Army (http://www.goarmy.com) for a long time. It’s always remained visually fresh with lots of interesting content on it. Ideals aside, I’d check the site from time to time to see any new designs and interface enhancements. Unfortunately, when visiting the site since the beginning of December I’d get nothing but the black screen of death on my Mac. I put up with the crashes for a while hoping for a fix from either Adobe or Apple. Unfortunately, I’d find myself going to more and more sites where my screen would suddenly go blank and my recourse was to perform a hard reboot by holding down the power button.

Today, for the first time in a long time I’m happy to report that I’m crash free and can finally view the Go Army website – along with many other sites. So, how am I now crash free? Well, I completely uninstalled the latest version of the Flash Player (which was released on December 3rd, 2007), version 9.0.115 and reinstalled version 9.0.47 of the Flash Player (which is considered to be a very stable release by many). After checking a few sites I’ve had problems with in the past (goarmy.com, cnet.com, download.com) I’m happy to say that I can view these sites again without the dread of losing data to a crash.

So, how does one completely uninstall the Adobe Flash Player from their Mac? Well, it’s now quite easy due to Adobe’s recently created Flash Uninstaller. Click here to download the Uninstaller. Once you’ve downloaded the archive just run it to completely uninstall Flash from your system (it takes a while to do this, so don’t fret if the pop up hangs on your screen for a while).

I even like how Adobe mentions on the Uninstaller download page that, “Due to recent enhancements to the Adobe Flash Player installers, you can now remove the player only by using the Adobe Flash Player uninstaller. To remove Flash Player, simply download and run the appropriate uninstaller for your system using the steps below.”

Sounds to me like some fancy PR speak. It’s probably a direct response to problems like this.

To download a previous version of Flash head here to download an archive of every release of version 9.X of the Flash plugin. As I mentioned earlier, I ended up installing version 9.0.47 based on the reviews it’s received as being stable and not one to promote the black screen of death. All you’ll need to do to install the Flash Player is unzip the archive and find the version that’s compatible with your Mac processor platform(there will be both a Universal Binary and PowerPC archive in most version releases).

Once you’ve unzipped the archive just install the player, fire up your browser and you’ll be surfing again without any problems. Just a thought, but maybe all this Flash crashing is something Steve Jobs has experienced first hand and is the real reason he’s remained opposed to supporting Flash on the iPhone?