Firefox eats my CPU like I eat ribs

[Tom Metro]

Danny Robert wrote:
> ...whenever firefox is eating my CPU I've always found it to be the
> flash plugin.

I find it is either Flash or JavaScript. On a 64-bit Ubuntu installation 
(8.10), I can cure the problem by killing the npviewer.bin, which 
apparently wraps the Flash plugin. On an older system running 32-bit 
Ubuntu (8.04) I find I get more relief from parasitic CPU theft by 
turning off JavaScript. Using NoScript or one of the similar extensions 
is probably more practical.

Even as Adobe tried opening up Flash, at the same time they made it 
easier for content producers to remove the user's ability to control a 
Flash animation. So these days if you right click on a Flash animation, 
rarely will you see the controls that permit you to stop the animation.

It's always been a pet peeve of mine that Firefox - an open source 
product that is supposedly not beholden to the desires of advertisers - 
has done little to shift the balance in providing end-users with greater 
control over how their CPU gets consumed. Consider that at one time 
Netscape supported a feature where you could stop animated GIFs. They've 
long since dropped that capability, and perhaps because animated GIFs 
are becoming rare, but where is the modern day equivalent? The browser 
ought to have an option you can set where all plugin and JS threads are 
put to sleep on inactive windows (with he ability to override that for a 
tiny number of sites where background processing is actually useful).

Sometimes I'll try and track down the problematic site using a process 
of elimination. I go to every open tab and switch it to about:blank, 
while watching the CPU consumption. Sometimes you hit on one and see a 
dramatic change. Other times it just gradually backs off as you clear 
out more pages. (Later you can go back to those tabs and hit the back 
button to pick up where you left off.) One could probably write an 
extension to do something like this automatically as tabs and windows 
get moved to/from the background. It'd be a hack, but an improvement.


Google's Chrome is heading in  better direction in this regard. They 
provide a task manager within the browser that lets you see which 
windows or plugins are wasting CPU and lets you kill them.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/