Sunday, February 19, 2006

Firefox CPU issues

For as long as I can remember, I've had this problem where firefox sucks up 100% of my CPU, freezes, locks, effectively dies but won't go away... and I have to kill it. I've always suspected it was Flash, but now I have some form of proof.

Installing the Firefox flash blocker extension made the problem go away. Now on sites where I want to see the flash (e.g. flickr) I can just click on any flash I want to see. On other sites, it doesn't start it up.

No more 100% CPU. No more locks. Eric is a happy man.

Also, in the debugging process, I discovered that pressing 'Escape' will stop all animated GIFs on the current page.

These two things combined mean that my browsing experience has dramatically improved in the last few days.

2 comments:

Chip Anderson said...

Hi, I just noticed the problem after I updated to Vista on my laptop. It seems that on all of my other installations that I had the FLASHBLOCK Add-On installed. I'll give it a try and see if the problem goes away.

Thank you for the observation.

dimo said...

yeeeaahhh!!!
thank you, sir!
It cut down Firefox cpu usage to 0% !!! From 50% and dramatically freezing all the time!!
Thanks!