I have a dream that when I type into a text box in Firefox, the characters won’t stop appearing on the screen while I’m typing, and then magically appear a few seconds later. I have a dream that when I move the mouse pointer to a different place and left click, it will actually move the cursor there when I do so, and not half a minute later. I have a dream that when I scroll down, the screen will actually move in real time, and not just the mouse pointer, and that it won’t then jump down tens of seconds later. I have a dream that when I click on a different tab, it will actually change to that tab, and not just sit there on the same window for thousands of milliseconds.
I’ve heard of Firefox problems in Linux, but the problems that I’ve heard seem to do with loading web pages, not the basic mechanics of using the program. Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be?
[Update a few minutes later]
My system monitor is telling me that Firefox is using about half the CPU. Is there any way to figure out exactly which tab, if any, is causing the problem?
I use Firefox on WinXP, and I have that kind of thing sometimes on certain script-heavy websites if certain Flash-type animations are displaying (ads, mostly). If I identify the right animation and block it, the phenomenon disappears.
On my machine Firefox has the nasty tendency to user ever greater amounts of memory. I’m not sure if it’s a memory leak or just excessive caching, but whatever it is, it slows things down enormously. Every now and then I have to restart it to get memory use down to what passes for normal levels these days. Amazingly, the whole system seems to become much more responsive after you’ve started and then closed a memory intensive application, like a game. After that performance increases to higher levels than before you started the game. Memory management on Windows is a strange thing.
This is a well known problem with flash. It is called lagging. Usually what is required is to restart the browser or reboot. But here are some other options you can try: http://badoh.com/2008/12/howto-fix-flash-lag-in-ubuntu/
Martihn, I’ve found that all my memory leaks were due to poorly written plugins and especially the firefox adobe pdf viewer. Uninstall all plugins and change your browser settings to open pdf’s using acrobat, rather than the firefox viewer. After doing the above two things a few months ago , I have had no memory leaks – and I’m a very heavy user, I usually have 20+tabs & pdf’s open at once.
I restart the browser(s) on a daily basis, because that’s pretty much how often Firefox spontaneously crashes.
Heh, this morning I noticed firefox was running very slow. I looked in task manager and saw it had crept up to 1 gig of memory usage. I think I had the same instance open for about 4 days. I notice that spontaneous crash to desktop with firefox happens quite often on my Ubuntu box. I also notice the lagging while I type is very bad when I am using twitter with firefox. I often go and open Safari when I want to tweet something.
I wonder if there is a utility to determine while plugin specifically causing the most egregious problems. Some of my plugins I just can’t live without though.
What I need is a plugin that automatically puts a ? mark at the end of obvious interrogatives.
It is often caused by plugins. Usually Flash or PDF. Because current versions of Mozilla run plugins in the same process and memory space as the browser bad plugins can muck things up royally. Supposedly they are fixing that in the next version, where plugins will run in a sandbox in a separate process. Google Chrome supposedly has separate processes per tab instance, so you shouldn’t have the same problem there. It may use a bit more memory though. Since each tab is in its own segregated storage, you have to duplicate more things in memory than otherwise.
Google and you shall receive. Here is a list of firefox plugins with known issues.
Also they suggest running an instance of firefox with the -safe-mode switch to see if the program behaves any differently. This can help narrow down if in fact it an application specific issue or is being caused by an extension or plug-in. Still it would be nice to see the working set memory size per plug-in to identify heavy hitters.
Switch to Chrome! I’ve had it crash on me maybe 3 times in ~1 year, and it is nowhere near the memory hog that Firefox is. I’m not a heavy plugin/extension user, so in my particular case, Chrome is much better.
Switch to Chrome!
Folks, please read my post. It’s a Firefox + Linux issue. Chrome doesn’t run on Linux (yet). And no, I won’t entertain suggestions to switch to Windows, either.
Ah, I found a plugin that automatically recovers leaked memory from Firefox. I just installed AFOM 2.0 and will see if this helps. It already looks like it is helping having gone from about 200 megs memory used upon start-up down to 75 megs. That’s with 16 windows open too!!
If you want to use Firefox (I use it) I recommend you install as few plugins as possible. If you install Flash for some reason, use Adblock Plus or Noscript. Configure it so PDFs are opened by an external application. It won’t be 100% perfect, but I get like 1 crash every 2-3 days. I seldom have less than 12 tabs open and often have twice as many. I get like 3 slowdowns a day and its usually some Flash content which I did not block chewing the CPU.
Err… I’m more familiar with Solaris, these days, but if you really want to bore into it you might try the pstack or strace commands. If you really want to break out the swiss army chainsaw of Linux monitoring tools, “systemtap” would be the thing – it’s possible there are existing systemtap scripts that will answer some of your questions.
It may also be the site. For example, I occasionally have serious problems with one of the sites commonly linked from here (think it’s Pajama Media, but I don’t recall for sure).
which tab, if any, is causing the problem
It’s the one with all the pictures and video of naked girls.
As others have said, disable the add-ons and see how it runs. Seems like since the 3.6 update mine has been unstable extreme, to the point I’m almost thinking about going back to IE. I had a really nasty bug with the 3.61 version where the Realtime plugin would randomly blank out webpages as these were loading. Seems to be fixed now.
Oh, and every time I’ve tried to load Chrome to try it out it’s crashed. Last night I noticed in my firewall logs that the last installation attempt left a copy of chrome.exe running in memory and it was constantly trying to phone home, just like a trojan. Ran a full uninstall to get rid of it and some of my current firefox problems seemed to clear up.
It looks like the guy that made the AFOM addin is also working on one that will show cpu utilization per tabbed instance. That way one could identify which page specifically is chewing up system resources. He said it took a couple of months to get AFOM published publicly though so will probably be a while.
I just use FoxIt Viewer. It takes a while to load compared to a plugin (I assume) but it’s lighter than Adobe and doesn’t destabilize the browser because it runs entirely outside it.
I agree with the PDF problem. I end up having to kill the acrobat process when everything slows or locks up and then magically everything runs again after acrobat is stopped.
Chromium totally runs on Linux. I’m writing this from Chromium on Linux.
https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa
I have a dream that the Flash plugin for Firefox (on WinXP) will actually work.
Specifically, that Flash would work more than just some of the time. For example, YouTube videos always work when viewed at YouTube’s site, but sometimes the videos are invisible to Firefox when embedded on some other site.
Plugins are one of technology’s Great Stupid Ideas That Seemed Brilliant At The Time. The correct way to proceed is through a mailcap file and a list of helper applications, so that if a helper goes wiggy it doesn’t bring down the browser, so that memory management is handled by the OS itself, not the browser, and so that in case of misbehaviour the user knows what to blame. But oh no we want it all to fit in one frame, so it looks seamless. Blech.
My other candidate for this Hall o’ Infamy is the mouse. Our dominant paradigm for switching tasks at the computer is to point with our hand like some preverbal ape. Koko want banana. You want a banana, Koko? Or to read your e-mail? Press the little button twice rapidly for yes, once for no…Yeesh.
Carl, don’t quit your day job. By keeping the plugin stuff inside the browser, the plugin developer never needs to understand what OS they’re on. It’s a necessary compromise to keep things more or less platform independent, so I understand.
Second, in case you haven’t noticed, most of us are still primates. Pointing is natural. Unless you have something better in mind, I still think leveraging a billion years of evolution for your computer interface is the way to go. Plus, it works quite well.
Day 2 with the same instance of Firefox running the AFOM 2.0 add-in. Firefox is only using 55 megs or ram. I think this is becoming my #1 pick for Add-ins.
Oh, I think I remember I reading somewhere that the Win32 version of Firefox running under WINE runs just as fast as the native linux-based distros. I believe that the Mozilla team spends more time debugging the Window version.
By keeping the plugin stuff inside the browser, the plugin developer never needs to understand what OS they’re on
Ha ha, nonsense. You’re thinking of what are commonly called “add-ons” to Firefox, which are merely chunks of javascript that make use of the DOM Firefox constructs out of the HTML/XML that it parses.
A plugin, like the Flash plugin, for example, or the Java plugin, what have you, is a piece of compiled code that interacts directly with both the OS and the browser. It has to, because it does stuff — like draw images on the screen — that the browser doesn’t know how to do. So you have to build it for each and every OS and platform. That’s why if you go to Adobe to get the Flash plugin, for example, they’ll ask you what OS you’re using.
Pointing is natural.
Gah. It’s only natural if you’re less than two. Once you develop the capacity for speech, no one communicates primarily by pointing. It’s far too inefficient. I’m reminded of this quite accurate portrayal of the tediousness of switching tasks on a computer using a mouse.
Unless you have something better in mind,
Well if I do, I’m obviously not going to write it here. It’d be worth $gazillions. I’d be lining up VC and throwing y’all off the scent by making spurious suggestions in public. Look! Ponies!
But that’s not my point, my point is that brilliant people who could have thought of better ways aren’t, becaue the problems was “solved” long ago, and too much inertia is in the “solution.” It’s like the wretched QWERTY keyboard layout, which everyone agrees is really stupid and inefficient, but which persists despite all rational efforts to the contrary because of the gigantic inertia behind it.
Plus, it works quite well.
You just think it works well, because you’ve forgotten how much faster and more naturally Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock communicated with the library computer. What we really need is a way to communicate naturally by speech with the computer.
Computer, I need to check my e-mail for an important message.
OK. When do you think you received it?
I’m not sure. Sometime last week.
OK. There are 144 e-mails from last week. Can you tell me anything more? From whom did it come? What were you doing when you received it?
Uh…let me think. It might have been from George. Or his assistant, what’s her name.
Frances? She sits in the cubicle across from George.
Oh yeah! That’s the one.
OK. There are 4 e-mails from George, and 4 from Frances. Most are very short, only a line or two, but there are two long ones.
It would be one of the long ones, definitely.
OK. The first is actually forwarded to you by Frances from Jim, with a CC to George. You opened it for the first time at 3:35 Wednesday, while you were editing a Word document titled ‘Why I Hate Computers.’ The second is from George, and you opened it Friday morning at 8.05 AM before doing anything.
The first one — that’s it..
Coming up on the monitor now. Do you want me to tag this e-mail in some additional way now, so it’s easier to find later?
Sure. Add the tag “December stumbling blocks for product release in January.”
OK.
See, that’s the way it should go. That’s the way we naturally communicate, in a back and forth way, zeroing gradually in on our goal with the assistance of moderately intelligent questions from our listener. None of the computer’s questions above requires any real conscience thinking; they could be produced by a mildly sensible search algorithm. There are some issues with parsing and generating language, but these, too, aren’t that severe. The big problem is: no one is working on this kind of thing, because the problem of telling a computer what to do is “solved.”
One thing that irks me is Firefox’s usurpation of the Blogger buttons for embedding boldface and italics. Instead of [strong][/strong] and [em][/em], I get this crap:
[span style=”font-weight:bold;”][/span]
[span style=”font-style:italic;”][/span]
The only problem with a verbal command system is the relative noise of the operations. A office floor of people chatting away with their computer will start to get a bit loud in a cubicle environment.
I think facial recognition, eye movement, and hand gestures will become a next generation interface.