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Reading the Google Chrome comic book last week lead me to the following line of thoughts:

A: It would be nice if I can kill a tab as easily in Firefox as in Google Chrome.
B: Nah, I can't because everything runs in the same process.
A: But those darn Flash/Flex apps—they routinely eats 100% of my CPU and hang all tabs, all the time
B: Too bad they are in-proc. But wait, they aren't on 64-bit Debian.

Recall that Adobe provides their Flash plug-in for 32-bit Linux only. And to use it in 64-bit Linux, a nspluginwrapper is needed (as I reported 410 days ago.)

Yesterday, I got into one of those situations where Firefox is using 100% CPU and is not responding. I fired up SystemMonitor and sure enough, underneath firefox-bin there is a subprocess called nsviewer.bin. I killed the nsviewer.bin process and Firefox (well, IceWeasel, to be precise) became responsive again.

I was happy.