Why are some web pages locking up my browsers?

Yes Im looking at at you Slate (www.slate.com) amongst others. Using chrome. firefox or IE, slate (all up do date run on a 4 core vista machine) cause the browser to become unresponsive, sometimes forwever and have to close and others it clears after 20 seconds or so. IE blames a plugin (unknown) but it cant be because it happens on all three. Some sort of script? and is there anyway of turning it off? And wouldnt a website check its pages once in a while to see if they work?

The same plugin is used by all three browsers.

In Firefox: Tools / Add-ons / Plugins will list them.

In Chrome, visit chrome://plugins/

thanks for the tip. the offender is that old bloater Shockwave - I have disabled it and it runs much smoother.