Safari & Firefox keep freezing...

Everything on my computer (24" iMac from 2008) runs fine. I upgraded to Snow Leopard and things were great.

However, today I go to watch some clips on hulu and YouTube, and Safari and Firefox keep freezing and I have to force quit them. I ran a software update and updated to the latest version of flash and it still freezes.

Now I go to check my gmail and it likes to freeze up again.

What am I doing to cause this to happen? Everything worked fine last night.

You could try disabling javascript in Safari, see if that solves it.

Since this is happening (1) on two different browsers, and (2) when playing videos and when checking email, I suspect that it's your ISP or Internet connection at fault rather than your computer. Try rebooting your modem to see if the connection stabilizes.

If the browsers themselves are crashing, it's unlikely to be caused by a connection issues.

Both Hulu (AFAIK) and YouTube use Flash, which is known to suck back CPU resources like there's not tomorrow. What does Activity Monitor say when you try to load each of these sites?