Firefox Slowness
by Jeremy on Jun.04, 2006, under Uncategorized
Can anyone tell me what Firefox’s deal is, lately? On Windows, there’s that annoying memory leak in 1.5+, and in the latest release (1.5.0.4) on Linux it’s just unbearably slow. I’m using Opera right now, and it’s so much more responsive and manageable … too bad it doesn’t like a lot of the fancier javascript and far too many sites look like crap …
June 4th, 2006 on 9:19 am
Most Firefox memory leaks are caused by bad extensions. I’ve had no memory leaks and I’ve managed to solve memory leaks for a few people I know by disabling extensions so I’d recommend giving it a go. Firstly, update all your extensions to the latest version.
If you still have memory leaks, try disabling them and re-enabling them one by one to see if you can find out which one is causing it. http://www.squarefree.com/2006/01/13/memory-leak-detection-tool/ can help you.
Many popular extensions including Session Saver, IETab, Noscript and Flashgot are known to have memory leaks.
June 4th, 2006 on 10:04 am
Well, I was experiencing the leak on Windows with no extensions installed. On Linux, Firefox is just flat-out slow after upgrading to 1.5.0.4, though I suppose that could be caused by extensions, because I have a few installed there. I’ll experiment and see what happens.
June 4th, 2006 on 4:37 pm
On Ubuntu 5.10 (or whatever version was before 6.06) I run Firefox 1.5.0.4 with the Web Developer, FoxyTunes, and Mouse Gestures extensions, and I don’t have any speed issues. I never really experienced huge memory loss when running in Windows, though that’s probably because the browser is never open for very long (I mostly use Windows for gaming.)