Since early August, visitors to online retailer Amazon.com have been complaining about the website causing Firefox or Safari to crash on Mac and Windows with some instances being bad enough to cause a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). The company has not yet responded to the complaints that continue to pile up on the Amazon feedback forum, Firefox’s bug tracker, and the Apple support forums.
One solution is to avoid Amazon’s main page and instead use a light version at www.amazon.com/access. (Clear your cookies to return to the full site.) Different tags for Chrome and IE allow those browsers to access the site. Switching browsers is one work-around. You might also be able to use the Firefox NoScript extension to block ssl-images-amazon script though that might negatively impact the site behavior but at least it won’t crash. In Safari, you can go to Preferences, Security and uncheck Enable JavaScript. It seems Safari on iOS is even impacted. Others are indicating that the browser and ATI graphics hardware combination as the reason for the more severe crashes.
The issue seemed to begin August 6th and has since garnered hundreds of ‘me too’ posts on the forums of the different organizations impacted (Amazon, Apple, and Mozilla). Twitter users have also chimed in to report their experience. We will reach out to Amazon for comment and update the post accordingly. (No response yet.)