Mozilla to crack down on add-ons that slow down Firefox
blog.mozilla.com
blog.mozilla.com
I don't think they're going to drop a banhammer on slow add-ons with Firebug at the top of the list.
More listed here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/
The only other change was to disable the video acceleration because I was getting some weird flashes on page reloads. My home page (Google.com) was flashing for a few milliseconds while reloading my local app. From what I remember, disabling the hardware acceleration fixed that issue.
Other than this it was basically make changes to my local site, hit refresh in FF, make changes, refresh again, and so on. Nothing special about this site, basic HTML / CSS / Javascript (jQuery), no Flash. You could see the memory steadily go up in the Task Manager.
The only reason I even noticed it was because the whole system was slowing down. I only have 3GB of RAM (Windows 7 64 bit), but I never noticed any memory pressures before. I could "feel" Windows paging the memory to disk which was slowing down everything on the box.
Good luck, and let me know if there's something else I could do to help.
My regular browsing is done in the default profile and the development work is done with the development profile.
Who cares about start-up time? My FF browser is ALWAYS open, it never closes.
Also I think most people close their browsers from time to time, even if most people on HN don't. (I've heard rumours that some people even turn their computers off at night.) These people care about start-up time.
As FF runs for a long time with many tabs, I get longer and longer pauses doing simple tasks -- scrolling, switching tabs, popping the right-context menu, setting focus into a field, etc. Sometimes, this sluggishness seems linked to (and fixable by closing) a few tabs of the most Javascript-heavy sites (those with many ad inserts, background status polling, etc.). I'd hoped FF4 would help but it's just about as bad as 3.X. Generally restarting, even with the exact same tab set, helps (for a while).
Separate but similar, sometimes I'm doing nothing and no tab is visibly busy but Firefox is reported as using 50-100% (out of 200%) CPU time. Give me any proxy for tab activity (object allocations, timer callbacks, method-dispatching, whatever) and I can probably kill the miscreants.
It's also very slow at shutdown and startup. With my profile (including cache) encrypted, restarting the browser takes over 10 minutes. I see the CPU pegged and the Firefox process reading through the entire cache as it shuts down, and again on startup - CPU limited by lsass, the process in Windows that runs EFS operations in user mode, but single threaded.
Seems like a bug really, unless they throw out outdated pages this way. Have you tried reporting it, if it's actually reading the entire cache?
I had reported feedback to "support" - http://support.mozilla.com/my/questions/802844 - but it seems a bit of a black hole. I've had occasion to measure it more precisely since, it really is on the order of 10 rather than 5 minutes.
This should be fixed to some extent by out-of-process Jetpacks.
Besides, it doesn't seem like they are even curating; rather, they are attempting to prod their sheep in a direction they believe will benefit the whole project.
This article is about extensions, not plugins. The names are confusing, but they're not the same thing. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Plugins
Of course there's not a chance that Mozilla will stop supporting Flash in its browsers, but I thought it was a funny comment on the performance of HTML5 video/interactive content vs Flash.