Firefox activity

[voodoopenguin]

Occasionally, and it's happening now, Firefox seems to go beserk with its activity (Activity Monitor showing %CPU at 130+) and everything in Firefox slows down. Writing this I can look up at the screen and see the individual letters being added about a second or two apart and I don't type that slow. It can be fixed by shutting Firefox down and restarting the program and everything is fine for another week or so. Closing all open Firefox windows and tabs isn't enough, even with nothing open I can see AM showing Firefox is using 110% CPU.

Anything obvious I should be looking at? Nothing else slows down at the same time, Safari is fine as are any other programs I am using.

Paul

[graylocks]

FF is a CPU hog. that's why i stopped using it months ago. Chrome seems to be the least hungry.

[Chakravartin]

Pull the Flash plugin and disable JavaScript.

[voodoopenguin]

I have now disabled Javascript although I'm sure I've done that before. Does that get changed back when updating the app? I don't think I had the Flash plug in as it's not in the plug in list.

Many thanks

Paul

[voodoopenguin]

OK, maybe I changed Javascript back on as I have just tried to do a search on eBay and it says I cannot until I enable Javascript.

Grrrrrrr

Paul

[Ted King]

I had a similar problem with the Camino browser that I use (I think both Camino and Firefox use similar Mozilla Gecko layout engines). I realized that the behavior started after I visited a certain website. Even if I closed the tab for that website, it was like something on that website had grabbed CPU resources and wouldn't let go until I completely shut down Camino. I had a hunch it was something Flash or Java related (as Chakravartan alludes to). As long as I didn't visit that one web site I didn't have the problem.

[modelamac]

voodoopenguin wrote:
Occasionally, and it's happening now, Firefox seems to go beserk with its activity (Activity Monitor showing %CPU at 130+) and everything in Firefox slows down. Writing this I can look up at the screen and see the individual letters being added about a second or two apart and I don't type that slow. It can be fixed by shutting Firefox down and restarting the program and everything is fine for another week or so. Closing all open Firefox windows and tabs isn't enough, even with nothing open I can see AM showing Firefox is using 110% CPU.

Anything obvious I should be looking at? Nothing else slows down at the same time, Safari is fine as are any other programs I am using.

Paul

Paul,

I get that with Safari when I have a bunch of extensions active, especially Ad Block. Try turning off those that stop ads and those that stop trackers.

[Black]

voodoopenguin wrote:
OK, maybe I changed Javascript back on as I have just tried to do a search on eBay and it says I cannot until I enable Javascript.
Grrrrrrr

Paul

Careful which advice you follow-- not much technical expertise left on this forum these days.
I've come to accept that Firefox needs to be quit and restarted every few days-- my 'last straw' is usually in trying to access eBay-- pages don't scroll smoothly.

[rgG]

I thought that the newer versions of FF had fixed that problem, but I guess not.
I have to quit and restart FF on my old iMac, running Tiger, when it gets so slow as to be unusable.
I had read that it was a memory leak problem, with the older versions, but thought that had been fixed with newer versions.
I am not a Safari fan, but Chrome seems to be a good alternative to FF.

[ka jowct]

It must depend to some extent on what sites you visit. I usually have about a dozen tabs open, and have never had the slowdowns you describe. But I also choose "deny" at some sites when prompted about loading content. This is on a Mac with 24GB RAM but I don't remember it happening on my G5 with 6GB.