Are there many people here running OS X that don't have problems apparently caused by Flash?
Flash may be the main cause of Safari crashes, but, well, my Safari never really crashes anyway.
It seems that neither Adobe nor Apple actually want to make a good experience for users, flash or otherwise, because independent of whose fault it is the problems are not getting addressed. I'm reminded of http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html, where Microsoft actually cared about the user experience enough to insert a massive kludge even though the bug wasn't their fault. And since the problems are not getting addressed, I'd be leery of using either Apple or Adobe products. Apple because they would rather destroy a product they don't like even though the users do, and Adobe because of the way they treat their products after release. Apple's defense is that they prefer the new and shiny vs the old and busted (which are subjective measurements). For years Apple was behind Flash, it was one of the reasons to use a Mac, at least for flash development. Apple was also behind Firewire for years, it was so much better than USB. Then all of a sudden it wasn't, much to the detriment of those people who had bought all that highend firewire hardware. Now, this usually ends up being good for the consumer, which is why Jobs has the reputation he does, and in Apple's defense, their standard MO of controlling the entire platform means they have to make the "hard" decisions about what they support, and it usually ends up being good all around, but the transition, when Jobs changes his mind, can be a real bitch.
What detriment? Apple only ships two models without FireWire, neither of which cater to the sort of person who owns a lot of high-end FireWire kit anyway.
But until Apple gets out there with clear and honest executive communication, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on.
(On the good side, Safari team has been permitted to communicate with the Player team, and some of these problems may be addressed. We're still seeking Apple Corps approval to decompress video off the CPU on their computers. It's their business decision to make.)
It is entirely unreasonable to assume that there is any statistically significant proportion of those plugin crashes that aren't Flash (well, maybe a few Java crashes...). Apple can't publicly blame Flash with any specificity, because they can't have Flash for OS X get abandoned until their mobile strategy has mostly killed Flash anyways. But they still have the raw data and stack traces. And that data indicates that Flash is by far the most crash-prone app on most Macs.
I've got a slow connection on my Mac at home, and have consistently used Flash-blockers and ad-blockers over the years to control what's pushed to me. Even so, Firefox and Safari regularly stall and require a restart. May be my Mac, though.
The majority of OS X crash reports are due to crashing plugins. Java applets et al are so rare that Flash might as well be the only plugin that is used.
Whether or not your web browser crashes when it isn't using Flash is completely off-topic, unless you are trying to insinuate that Apple can't even tell from a stack dump where the crash originated. In which case, you're taking an awfully roundabout way to calling Apple incompetent liars.
Indeterminate. The logs show that Flash made a call. It didn't show where that call went when it failed. (I usually run Safari and Firefox in parallel on my Mac because both have stability problems, despite using a Flash blocker.) Most of the Player code is the same across OS, only the outer wrappers and connecting APIs differ.
On the happy side, there has recently been some increased cooperation with the Safari team, and when combined with the mobile optimizations you can expect to see some of the gains described by Kevin Lynch: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_...
Fedora 12 has an "automatic bug reporting tool" that is annoying in that it often shows up when you aren't expecting it, or when you know something crashed that Fedora folks can't do anything about -- so I've usually opted not to submit the things it wants to report. But that may be a losing battle in the long run, since more data collected could actually get bugs fixed, and then there are statistics on how frequently crashes are a problem for people. Thing is, I know how much bogus stuff gets collected with these kinds of tools, and it's difficult to sift through, so in some sense, I think I'm actually helping them by not submitting things I think may be bogus.