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

http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/01/improving-add-on-performance/

by there • 15 years ago

77 40 15 years ago

blog.mozilla.com

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/

melling• 15 years ago

I knew it! :-). Run it with ExtJS and you'll start to go crazy.

pbz2• 15 years ago

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.

ronnoch• 15 years ago

The memory problem is pretty serious. I've been using the Memory Restart addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/memory-restar...), which shows memory use in the bottom corner and lets you click to restart when it goes over a certain amount.

pcwalton3• 15 years ago

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.

viraptor2• 15 years ago

I like the irony of this being #7: FastestFox - Browse Faster: 31% slower...

mattmanser• 15 years ago

Stumbleupon's 11th, wtf is that doing at startup?

prsimp• 15 years ago

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.

scorpioxy• 15 years ago

I have firebug and other development related addons in their own profile because of this.

My regular browsing is done in the default profile and the development work is done with the development profile.

EdiX• 15 years ago

I wish that list wouldn't be about a metric I couldn't care less about but unfortunately everyone else seems to only care about start up time :(

barrkel2• 15 years ago

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 startup - CPU limited by lsass, the process in Windows that runs EFS operations in user mode, but single threaded.

viraptor2• 15 years ago

> the Firefox process reading through the entire cache as it shuts down

Seems like a bug really, unless they throw out outdated pages this way. Have you tried reporting it, if it's actually reading the entire cache?

pcwalton3• 15 years ago

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

barrkel2• 15 years ago

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.

WildUtah• 15 years ago

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

sp332• 15 years ago

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

hammock2• 15 years ago

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.

hammock2• 15 years ago

People in the comments need to realize the article, the shit list, etc all of that is about effects on START-UP time only.

Who cares about start-up time? My FF browser is ALWAYS open, it never closes.

philh• 15 years ago

I don't see many people failing to realise this.

Also I think most people close their browsers from time to time, even if most people on HN don't. (I've heard rumours that some people even turn their computers off at night.) These people care about start-up time.

prodigal_erik• 15 years ago

Does the average person actually shut down to the point of doing a cold boot the next day? I have the impression most just tap the power button (which hibernates to disk by default), or else simply walk away and let this happen automatically.

hollerith• 15 years ago

It never needs to be restarted? What OS is it on?

jarin• 15 years ago

Curation is the new Open.

cageface• 15 years ago

Was going to say the same thing. It seems that many open projects are realizing they're going to have to exert more control to provide a competitive user experience.

technomancy• 15 years ago

Did you read the article or just the linkbait HN submission headline?

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

Are you just being snarky, or do you actually have a problem with it?

Besides, it doesn't seem like they are even curating; rather, they are attempting to prod their sheep in a direction they believe will benefit the whole project.

maxxxxx2• 15 years ago

I don't understand why they can't give us a profiler that shows memory consumed by add-on and start up time by add-on . This shouldn't be difficult. Then everybody can see where the problems are.

pcwalton3• 15 years ago

Breaking down memory usage by add-on is very difficult. Objects in Firefox's heap don't track the ownership of the module that created them.

This should be fixed to some extent by out-of-process Jetpacks.

DarkShikari• 15 years ago

How about addons that eat tons of memory? My Firefox still periodically OOMs and crashes, despite the update to 4, but it's impossible to see which addons are responsible.

eferraiuolo• 15 years ago

Chrome has the Task Manager tool which helps you track down tabs which are being resource hogs (CPU and RAM). I was curious if something like this existed in Firefox 4 or there was an extension for a feature like this? (I looked but couldn't find anything promising)

gojomo• 15 years ago

Totally agree, and even before Firefox gets any sort of strong tab isolation, I would love a readout that provides any sort of vague 'blame' for CPU/memory usage to individual tabs.

As FF runs for a long time with many tabs, I get longer and longer pauses doing simple tasks -- scrolling, switching tabs, popping the right-context menu, setting focus into a field, etc. Sometimes, this sluggishness seems linked to (and fixable by closing) a few tabs of the most Javascript-heavy sites (those with many ad inserts, background status polling, etc.). I'd hoped FF4 would help but it's just about as bad as 3.X. Generally restarting, even with the exact same tab set, helps (for a while).

Separate but similar, sometimes I'm doing nothing and no tab is visibly busy but Firefox is reported as using 50-100% (out of 200%) CPU time. Give me any proxy for tab activity (object allocations, timer callbacks, method-dispatching, whatever) and I can probably kill the miscreants.

tobylane• 15 years ago

Work on Core now, Core later and Core last. That's all. Ps, if you find firefly too big, try Dragonfly. It's here http://www.opera.com/dragonfly/

known• 15 years ago

With https://addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/addon/configuration-ma... we can configure hidden features of Firefox

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

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