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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

I can't find that text on the page at the moment, but it's the truth.

Firefox (3.6) seems to have a really nasty problem in its garbage collection system. If I leave it open for more than a couple of days, under normal use, it starts hanging for a couple of seconds every minute to half-minute -- and it hangs for longer, more often, the longer I leave it open.

Closing and restarting Firefox seems to clear the issue up. At least, for a while.

The only reason I still use Firefox is because of AdBlock Plus. The moment someone comes up with a replacement that's as good, I'm done with it and never looking back.

edit: oh, and by the way: this bug, combined with Google "Instant"? Very not the best thing ever.

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I regularly ran Firefox 3.6 (I'm on v4 now) for weeks at a time, and never had such issues. I'd guess it's an extension or plugin you had installed.

My biggest problem with Firefox (v4 only) is shutting it down takes ages as it iterates through every file in the cache, which is encrypted on my machine. I limited my cache size to 50MB, which seems to have limited the pause times to something reasonable.

I cannot stand Chrome though; I hate the way it selects text on the page with the mouse (I'm a compulsive selection-reader), and the cobbled-together extension replacements for the Bookmarks menu don't work nearly as well as a proper menu.

I do have a few extensions installed & enabled -- AdBlock Plus, Firebug, Greasemonkey (rarely used, I should just uninstall it), Flashblock, and YSlow.

But, I've seen similar behavior on at least one other system, and the only extension we had in common there was AdBlock Plus. The behavior also predates Greasemonkey.

The other system is newer, and the slowdown there is less pronounced (though still noticeable), which leads me to suspect that there's some task that runs regularly that performs well enough on fast enough systems to be less problematic, but becomes a miserable dog on older systems -- a pretty typical case of programmer "fast enough for me".

Apropos of nothing: I don't get you compulsive selection readers. I'm always a little bemused when one of you speaks up. Why do you do that? It's so weird. :-)

I have no idea, all I know is that when I can't do it it feels like something is deeply wrong :-)

There's also an "AddBlock Plus" for Chrome, and a short test shows it that works decently, but I don't know if the quality is the same. Maybe worth a try?

Chrome's ad blocker grabs items after they've downloaded and (briefly) displayed on the page, and then hides them.

Also, Chrome is still not available for my aging PPC.

I don't think it does that any more in recent versions of Chrome. There is an 'onbeforeload' event which can block the ads before they start loading.

FYI, if you're still using 3.6 (as mentioned in an earlier post) there is a fork of firefox 4 for PPC here http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ .

If that is the case than drop FF and switch to ChromePlus because it overs what you want. Although not as convenient as FF, still I haven't looked back.

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