Firefox is Crap
I’m a big fan of Firefox and always have been. I was a big fan of Firebird before that too (remember that one, oldtimers?). IE6 has been the bane of my designers’ life and IE7, although much of an improvement over Internet Excruciator 6, is still not as good as I’d expect from a team of talented programmers with a multi-billion dollar sugar daddy.
So why do I think Firefox is crap?
Well I don’t, per se, I just feel that the last couple of releases have been pretty shoddy. Firefox has always been a bit of a resource hog, but I mainly put that down to my multi-tab habit, often having two or more Firefox browsers open with 20 tabs in each.
Firefox has just done it again – 2x browsers open, a total of 11x tabs and although only 130k of memory being used, it’s sucking 98% CPU!
It’s been the Firefox 2.0.0.8 and rapidly followed Firefox 2.0.0.9 releases that have me gnawing things on my desktop. I just checked my Task Manager for the FF and 19 tabs I’m runing and it was using 200,000k + of memory, and it pretty much locked up my machine. Granted, it’s my trusty old HP Athlon 900Mhz with I can’t remember how much ram, but the point is, memory usage wasn’t this bad before.
Even my Dell 1.73Mhz laptop with 2Gb of ram and my Dell 2Ghz+ with 2Gb ram desktop are suffering too.
I googled for answers the other day and was tipped to diable any plugins. Well, they’re ALL uninstalled and I’m STILL seeing Firefox slow as hell.
Anybody got any answers? Was there a “bugger up Firefox” fix by M$ in the last security update to Win XP or is this latest version of Firefox really just a pile of crap?
I think we’ve got to the root of the problem that you and some other Firefox 3 Beta 1 testers are seeing.
Starting Tuesday, we began receiving reports, like yours, of a new memory/cpu usage issue that happens shortly after a normal startup and can spike the CPU and chew up hundreds of MB of RAM. This is apparently happening to people with new profiles or in profiles that have a very outdated list of bad sites for the Phishing Protection feature and the Malware Protection feature.
What’s going on is that soon after Firefox is started, Firefox tries to fetch updates to the site forgery and malware lists — the lists of bad sites that allows Firefox to warn users about suspected Phishing and Attack sites. If the profile has very outdated or no local lists, as is the case for a new Firefox profile, Firefox is trying to bring down these rather large lists in one big chunk rather than slowly in small chunks. This causes Firefox to consume large amounts of CPU and memory and can slow the users machine to a crawl.
This problem is due to the change in the “SafeBrowsing Protocol” which only affects Firefox 3 Beta 1 and nightly build users. If you’re on Firefox 2, this isn’t going to affect you.
The work-around for this problem was for us to throttle it on the server side. We’ve done that and if you try Firefox 3 Beta 1 again, it should be fine.
Thanks Asa, I really appreciate you taking the time to point that out.
It’s still an issue in late ver 2 Firefox releases as I’ve not had the opportunity to beta test 3 yet. I’m just hoping that 3 becomes stable soon enough to get Firefox back on its legs again.