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.
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.
Well, I can tell you that I only had the latest FF4 and Firebug installed (this was 3 days ago). No other add-ons were installed.
The only other change was to disable the video acceleration because I was getting some weird flashes on page reloads. My home page (Google.com) was flashing for a few milliseconds while reloading my local app. From what I remember, disabling the hardware acceleration fixed that issue.
Other than this it was basically make changes to my local site, hit refresh in FF, make changes, refresh again, and so on. Nothing special about this site, basic HTML / CSS / Javascript (jQuery), no Flash. You could see the memory steadily go up in the Task Manager.
The only reason I even noticed it was because the whole system was slowing down. I only have 3GB of RAM (Windows 7 64 bit), but I never noticed any memory pressures before. I could "feel" Windows paging the memory to disk which was slowing down everything on the box.
Good luck, and let me know if there's something else I could do to help.
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.
If I leave Firefox open during the day the memory goes up to 1.2 GB. The performance slows down at about 800BM memory. I have 8 GB so it's not a big deal but it still seems an awful lot of memory.
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.
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.
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.
As a quasi-average person regarding computer usage, I can tell you about the way that less tech-savvy people around me deal with their laptops, as I deal less and less with people with PCs:
If it is an older model, it tends to be a matter of "hibernate until it runs so slowly that I have to restart."
Other than that, there is always some hard-core believers that you really need to shut off completely every time you use it.
I have one non-tech-savvy friend who just holds his laptop's power button down for 5 seconds when he's done using it. "Oh yeah, it's great, it shuts down properly and instantly and I never lose any data!" I had to emphatically explain to him that he was effectively playing Russian roulette with his life's work. This is just an anecdote, but while anecdotes cannot set averages, they can be used to find a lower bound on extremes.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/