Firefox Add-ons with the Slowest Start-up | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Add-ons with the Slowest Start-up

addons.mozilla.org

167 pointsthere49 comments

As long as we aren't talking minutes and just seconds, I close my browser once every 24 hours typically.

I can deal with a 15 second startup time for a super-rich browsing and debugging environment.

Once loaded, new tabs/windows do not have the startup penalty.

That said, the worst plugins can probably modify themselves to lazy-load the bulk of their code once the browser is started in the background when idle is detected?

Unfortunately, for me its a catch22 situation. I hate firefox because its slow, and love/depend on firefox, because of firebug (which apparently makes firefox slow.)

Have you tried Chrome's inspect element?

I use firebug to trace the HTTP requests, mainly. I know there are alternatives (for both Chrome and Firefox), but none of them compare to firebug. May be its because of my comfort/acquaintance level with firebug.

Used to think like you, but chrome's network tab (in the developer tools) has really come a long way

You are probably correct. But you know, dev. tools are like IDEs/Editors. Once you get settled with one, there is a level of comfort with the tool, you dont get with others.

if were going to talk about HTTP monitor alternatives please dont forget to talk about Charles. In many ways i prefer it to built in browser monitors because it is designed to capture any requests regardless of source.

Chrome and Opera have a Firebug alternative built into them.

Use multiple profiles, one for everyday browsing and one for Firebug.

Thats what I do (well, sort of). just that I have to keep another browser installed.

                           --Written at my Google Chrome.

i resisted switching to chrome for months because i thought the chrome inspector was inferior to firebug, but i got used to it after forcing myself to switch primarily to chrome. now i find it's actually superior in many ways.

Indeed. Little things like proper emacs keybindings in the JS terminal (Ctrl-P for previous line = lifesaver!) make Chrome's inspector preferable. Haven't needed to go back except for the YSlow/Firebug integration [probably a Chrome plugin for that as well].

from a brief observation, the tests in the "audits" tab seem to follow rules very similar to yslow.

FireQuery is the only thing in Firebug that I can't seem to get in Chrome.

Firequery, YSlow, or more generally any Firebug extension not built into the Webkit Developer Tools.

Also, proper stack traces.

YSlow was recently released in chrome flavour:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ninejjcohidippng...

Google Page Speed?

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html

Actually FireBug sucks for inspecting elements. I prefer Chrome and Stylizer (CSS). FireBug is good in JavaScript (very good) and the browsing of the DOM. I like it.

I love Chrome but it destroys pictures with it's colour management on Mac.

I gladly take the hit that FireBug causes, same reason. The slightly longer startup time doesn't bother me (yet).

Also, I can't stand webbrowsing on an installation which doesn't have some form of adblocking. What a difference! I find ads horribly distracting, especially when they have flashing animations.

Not only does it slow down Fx start up times, but also new window creation times, even when it's not active ('off' state). Disabling it completely in add-ons restores performance. On my Mac this means seemingly instant vs noticeable delay, and that bothers me.

I think I have quite a lot of them (Firebug, greasemonkey, NoScript, Scarpbook, etc.) but the thing is, I don't close my browser every hour or so. Startup times are nothing if you don't do startups too often.

What would bother is any performance impacts with them running. However we don't have figures for that.

This page is responsible for a lot of FUD.

So many people take it to mean, in effect, "Firebug makes Firefox slower". When in fact it means "Firebug makes Firefox slower to start up".

This page says nothing about the performance impact once firefox has loaded. I think that would be a more useful metric, and hope to see it in the future.

I have nothing to prove it, but I heard many times at least from former version that Firebug was quite memory hungry, thus slowing Firefox after many hours of use. I may be wrong.

It's true, it got a lot better with firefox 3.5.

Not sure if it was firefox or firebug that improved things (or both).

that may be the case, but it's nothing to do with what this page is measuring.

Would be more interesting and useful to see the overall impact of the addons on loading pages.

I hardly start up Firefox unless for upgrades. A list of add-ons that reduce loading / rendering performance would be even more interesting. I know by experience that the Skype one is very bad (and Firebug also slows down, but that's expected and luckily you can disable that when not debugging).

My Firefox 4 often became unresponsive for 3-4 seconds. Just today I finally nailed the cause - Mozilla's own Open Web Apps addon. After disabling it everything flies again :-)

So it's not only about startup time. My desktop computers (and so Firefox) usually run without restarts. I really hope that Electrolysis (out-of-process stuff, now implemented only for plugins like Flash) for addons will make finding bottlenecks far easier.

EDIT: It seems the Mozilla plan is not to have each addon in a separate process: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Jetpack_Processes

The slow startup isn't so much a problem for me, because I normally fire up firefox only once a day. However the latest 4.0 on Mac OS X suffer from a terrible memory leak, and I must restart it every two hours or less. else my mac slows to a crawl and restarting firefox literally takes minutes (swap...).

In fact it's so bad that I'll probably revert to FF3.6 on Mac OS X until there's a serious update.

Faster start-ups are fine, and all, but I'm much more interested in what happens after the start-up. For example, I'd be more interested in knowing what is causing Firefox to consume 500-600 MB of memory, once a few hours have passed.

Well, complex addons like Firebug or iMacros will always be slower than addons that are essentially fancy bookmarks.

I do not care about start up time - I do care about page load time and general responsiveness once Firefox is running.

Regardless of Add-on start-up speed, I found annoyance with Firefox itself. Occasionally on launch, I would be asked whether I wanted to install or skip updates to my Add-ons.

I found this process of having to choose to install or skip to be too much of a distraction, killing my flow when I was "in the zone" and wanted to look something up fast.

For this reason I stopped using Firefox and have been happy with Chrome ever since.

I'm not getting it - why is addon loading a blocking action in the browser startup process in the first place??

I'm only using Adblock out of those, and i wouldnt mind if adblock was not loaded until a few seconds after I got control. This would highlight very effectively that the addon - and not the browser - is slow. And hopefully get the authors to have something done about it.

I'm quite disappointed that they don't seem to provide any feedback or guidance for developers on how to write well-performing plugins. Without that to sweeten the post it just seems a bit ungrateful, given that plugins are one of the major reasons Firefox got so popular in the first place.

Edit: it's there on the right, but my well-honed ad blindness didn't let me see it. Either way it's not exactly prominent.

This could potentially have a bad impact on the usage of Firefox. A heck of a lot of developers use it specifically for its addons like Firebug..

Will more people now leave Firefox on the bench and pick other inspectors like Google Chromes?

Maybe Mozilla should have thought about the impact that such an article could potentially have before releasing it to the big bad world..

While I am personally largely against extensions, I wouldn't be if their allocation was managed better. I think that the extension should say what websites it's intended for (Greasemonkey does this) and be in the javascript process for those pages only. It shouldn't be separate, it shouldn't be in memory before the page is even open.

> While I am personally largely against extensions

... what? Why in the world? If no browser had extensions I'd probably quit the web altogether.

I've been using Opera for years, if I did need anything I'd use UserJS (Greasemonkey done properly, built-in). I have no extensions, and only two userJSs (youtube download, and gawker fix). I have adblocker and firebug as built in functions of the browser, I have custom searches instead of things like Tineye extension that I have on Chrome.

I use two browsers, for very separate purposes. Firefox is for research (good automatic proxy handling, Zotero), Chrome for general browsing (fast, stable). It's got the added benefit that it splits my focus--if I'm on Firefox it's for serious stuff.

I'm using the web-developer add-on without this impact. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer...

Funny how we always want more when we're given something. I'd like to see what the add-ons do to page loads and also the same for Chrome.

Ah! This is good. I've been looking for this. Feels good to see that just one web developer addon (Firebug) features on the top 10.

I'll gladly take that kind of hit if it means I can use Firebug.

Heck, I'd gladly pay a few hundred bucks for it if it was a commercial product.

They accept individual donations and corporate sponsorships, and they also sell some stuff: http://getfirebug.com/contribute

(You probably know that already but I am mentioning it for people who don’t. I had never thought of Firebug and donations myself until I saw a message during an upgrade about a month or two ago.)

Ironically the add-on fastest fox slows down firefox by 33%.

Mozilla should really get their own house in order (re: Firefox 4 huge memory leaks) before calling out add-ons on slow performance.

#8: FastestFox - Browse Faster

Ironically Fasterfox is one of those problems.

I am annoyed by the slow startup time of FF, but since it mostly stays open all day long I can deal. I think the adblocking that firefox has is superior since it can prevent content from being downloaded, that alone is worth it. Firebug + FireSass + FireQuery are some tools I can't live without. Chrome has yet to match the features. Sure some keybindings are not as great, but overall a better tool is a better tool.

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