So your Firefox browser is slow as molasses or unresponsive, and in fact your entire system is slowing towards a screeching halt. If you’re on a Mac, you do a ‘top’ and see that a process called “plugin-conta” is eating up your memory. If you’re on a Windows machine, well, you know the symptoms. What is plugin conta, and what to do? Here’s what.

Users, particularly Mac OS X users who use Firefox, are reporting that when trying to install the latest update to Adobe Flash, the Flash installer just hangs at 90%, and never completes, no matter what they do. If your Adobe Flash installer is stopping at 90%, here’s what to do.

Google Street View is back for iOS 6 users. It seems that Google is the knight in shining armor to the whole Mapplegate fiasco that has left scores of iOS 6 users frustrated with the quality of Apple maps. The victory is small, but at this point, iOS 6 users will take any scrap thrown their way.

As promised, here are our impressions of the new Android Sidekick, the first Sidekick with a touch screen, out this week from T-Mobile. The first thing to know is that this is one sweet phone, with the always-superlative Sidekick keyboard, which blows all other slider QWERTY keyboards out of the water, and blazing-fast 4G. There are already a few standard reviews out there – this review is the ‘other’ review, with missing tidbits and tips not found in those other reviews, like why is Gmail not syncing on the Sidekick 4G? And where is the flash on the 4G Sidekick? And does this version of the Sidekick still have those auto text macros (automatic word replacement) built in?

A few months ago we wrote about the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed “Do Not Track” list and legislation. One of the biggest invaders of your privacy is cookies that track you, and that respawn after you (think you) have deleted them, or, as they are known, “Zombie Cookies” (so-called because they come back from the dead). As defined in Wikipedia, “a zombie cookie is any HTTP cookie that is recreated after deletion from backups stored outside the web browser’s dedicated cookie storage.” Variations on this theme include the Adobe Local Shared Object (LSO) cookie, and the Evercookie. There was a Zombie cookie law suit last summer, levelled against such industry giants as ABC, NBC, MTV, ESPN, MySpace, and Hulu, alleging that they were using Zombie cookies that respawned after being deleted because their backups were being stored in Flash. That technology was provided by Quantcast, who was the lead defendant in the Zombie cookie lawsuit. Not long after, the FTC announced their “Do Not Track” legislation proposal, and now Consumer Reports is asking their members to contact their Congressmen in support of the proposal.

The issue of Flash – or rather lack thereof – on the iPhone and iPods (and now the iPad), has long been a source of frustration and consternation for Apple devotees. More and more discontent has spilled into public discussion, with Apple openly taking what some perceive as potshots at Adobe, the makers of Flash, and Adobe, in turn, responding. Now it has erupted into open discussion (ok, attacks), with none less than Steve Jobs openly publishing on the Apple web site his “Thoughts on Flash”, and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen responding in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.