what means it that firefox keeps greying out?

[J]

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 06:30, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>
>  i'm not sure if this is related to my running a 2.6.34-rc7 kernel
> but, recently (within the last day or so), i've had my firefox session
> suddenly go dim/grey, and become totally unresponsive.  it *appears*
> to be related to when it's trying to load a page, but i've never seen
> this behaviour before on any distro.
>
>  in some cases, if i just wait, it will come back; in other cases,
> it's a lost cause and i have to kill firefox.  in an extreme case, i
> had to power down the entire machine and reboot.
>
>  anyone else seeing this?  thoughts?

Run top and watch firefox's status when it does that.  All apps can go
grey like that when something is using ~100% CPU or such... or they
get hung or land in a wait state....

FF has been famous for that, especially when Flash is involved.

Cheers
Jeff