The Mozilla-based Camino web browser for Mac OS X has just launched 0.9 alpha 1, and the release notes* include this item:

Rarely see “beach balls of death”.

I don’t remember whether I’d heard the term before (I recall the “spinning pizza of death,” or maybe of doom), but I knew exactly what it meant.

*In spring 2007, they restructured the website. The release notes for the 0.9 series have been incorporated into the notes for 1.0.