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Mozilla to crack down on add-ons that slow down Firefox

blog.mozilla.com

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Re: Mozilla to crack down on add-ons that slow down Firefox

#11

Post by pcwalton »

barrkel wrote: post #4

Hopefully they'll start with FF4 itself - IME it's a lot slower at eg switching heavy-content tabs. I conjecture it's trading CPU for memory usage, I'd prefer the reverse. 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 sta…

That would indeed be a bug. Filed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647479

Re: Mozilla to crack down on add-ons that slow down Firefox

#12

Post by prsimp »

reemrevnivek wrote: post #2

Interestingly, the slowest-performing add-on they show is the well-respected and popular Firebug, which adds 75% to the start-up time. I expected to see some low-quality add-on at the top. 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/

I found this to be pretty surprising as well. It also made me wonder what Firefox feels like with no addons installed. I pretty much automatically add my 'essential' addons whenever dealing with a clean version of Firefox and this list includes 2 of the top 10 slow performers (Firebug and Xmarks). Now I kind of want to strip it down to bare FF just to get a good baseline.

Re: Mozilla to crack down on add-ons that slow down Firefox

#13

Post by barrkel »

pcwalton wrote: post #11
barrkel wrote: post #4

Hopefully they'll start with FF4 itself - IME it's a lot slower at eg switching heavy-content tabs. I conjecture it's trading CPU for memory usage, I'd prefer the reverse. 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 sta…

That would indeed be a bug. Filed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647479

I voted for it.

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.

Re: Mozilla to crack down on add-ons that slow down Firefox

#14

Post by sp332 »

WildUtah wrote: post #8

If they're finally throwing out Flash, that could really improve the internet. We'll take our HTML5 video now, please.

Flash is a Firefox plugin made by Adobe, not Mozilla. It's not installed by default, it's added when you install Flash on your computer. If you want it off, just uninstall Flash from your computer or type "about:addons" into your address bar and disable the Flash plugin yourself.

This article is about extensions, not plugins. The names are confusing, but they're not the same thing. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Plugins

Re: Mozilla to crack down on add-ons that slow down Firefox

#15

Post by pbz »

pcwalton wrote: post #10
pbz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firebug is well worth it, in my opinion. I installed FF4 recently and was happy to notice that Firebug was a lot faster. Unfortunately, either FF4 or Firebug is leaking memory like crazy. I'm talking 800MB in 20 minutes with only two tabs open debugging a simple local application. I had to go back to FF3.6. Hopefully they'll fix that soon.

Mozilla developer here - If you have steps to reproduce, I'd love to hear them and I'll get them forwarded to the proper people.

Well, I can tell you that I only had the latest FF4 and Firebug installed (this was 3 days ago). No other add-ons were installed.

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.

Re: Mozilla to crack down on add-ons that slow down Firefox

#17

Post by hammock »

sp332 wrote: post #14
WildUtah wrote: post #8

If they're finally throwing out Flash, that could really improve the internet. We'll take our HTML5 video now, please.

Flash is a Firefox plugin made by Adobe, not Mozilla. It's not installed by default, it's added when you install Flash on your computer. If you want it off, just uninstall Flash from your computer or type "about:addons" into your address bar and disable the Flash plugin yourself. This article is about extensions, not plugins. The names are confusing, but they're not the same thing. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Pl…

Actually the article is about add-ons, which according to FF terminology include extensions, themes, and 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.

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