To whom it may concern

[melodie]

The problem that a friend and I are having with Firefox on Win XP, and Win 7.  Also my install of Firefox on PClos Openbox Bonsai is that Firefox is a memory hog.  The amount of ram that Firefox is consuming is insane.  And this is with only one tab open.

May I ask if you have installed and are using NoScript ? https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/noscript

I believe it exists also for Chrome/Chromium and for Opera.

Have you tried to clean Firefox by starting a "health check" ? (After doing backups of what you personally want to keep although some parts are saved while resetting Firefox). After I did that my firefox folder lowered down to 39 MiB (after I reinstalled several plugins) while the original one was 115 MiB, and several annoyances I had met with have been solved.

[melodie]

At the moment the Firefox 21 which I have reset uses 12.9% of the available memory, with 3 tabs opened. While I am typing here it raises as 13.3%. The machine has 2 GB also.

The total amount ram used for the system, one console, the three firefox tabls and Sylpheed opened is 420 MB for 2010 MB seen in htop.

[djohnston]

As for the no script plugin..........No it is not installed.  But I have suggested that my friend install the no script plugin.

Ah, plugins. Something I didn't think about earlier. Some Firefox plugins can double memory used by Firefox. You should check with the user to see what s/he has installed. Some could be a source of high memory usage.

On the same note, I would suggest doing what Mel says. In addition to NoScript, I recommend AdBlock Plus and HTTPS Everywhere. (NOTE: There are some bogus sites offering an HTTPS Everywhere download. Make sure you get it from eff.org's website!)

One last thing. Turn off java! In the Linux version of Firefox, go to Tools > Addons > Plugins. If Java plugin is listed there, DISABLE IT.

[djohnston]

I gotta tell ya about this other Firefox plugin. Yesterday I signed some Mozilla-sponsored petition. After coming here and reading one of ka9yhd's posts on Firefox using a lot of memory, I looked at tasks running. There was a persistent cookie from that Mozilla petition site. And it had spawned another 4 tasks for a total of 5, each consuming some 2.5 MB of RAM. (I'm guessing a new task was spawned each time I visited a new site.) I dumped all my web cookies. Had to sign back in here as a result. But, that tracking cookie's 5 tasks were still running in memory, even though it did not show in the Firefox list. It persisted until I closed Firefox.

While looking at Tor addons today, I came across the Self-Destructing Cookie addon. Briefly,

Self-Destructing Cookies is not just a cookie manager, it's a new cookie policy. ... Self-Destructing Cookies automatically removes cookies when they are no longer used by open browser tabs. ... Tracking cookies will be detected and removed immediately. They are identified purely by their behaviour - no need for a blacklist that needs to be kept up to-date.

So far, it is working as advertised. As I said before, I dump all cookies after closing a web browsing session, anyway. This addon dumps a site's tracking cookies automatically within 10 seconds of leaving the site. Of course, the preferences are adjustable.

[patrick013]

Nice find....

I agree, I'm getting all kinds of cookies self-destructing, mostly
from YouTube and Yahoo, which I never use.    Figure that one
out ?

[djohnston]

I agree, I'm getting all kinds of cookies self-destructing, mostly
from YouTube and Yahoo, which I never use.    Figure that one
out ?

Patrick,

Here's another one for you, Collusion.

Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox that allows you to see which sites are using third-party cookies to track your movements across the Web. It shows, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers.

[patrick013]

Here's another one for you, Collusion.

This is fun, kinda like spying on the spies.

I don't know, somebody on Yahoo and YouTube is after me.         

[Taco.22]

Chromium allows you to clear cookies when the browser is closed.  It comes under Settings/Privacy/Content Settings/Cookies.  You select "Keep local data only until I quit my browser" and then set exceptions, like this forum for example.  Seems to be working - I'm not sure how to check if it isn't!  I do know that sites that need passwords that I don't set exceptions for always default to the log-in requirement when the browser is relaunched.

[melodie]

Chromium allows you to clear cookies when the browser is closed.

So does Firefox.

ka9yhd: if your friend continues having browsing slow after deactivating plugins, and you said it is a Windows box, there might be some "services" started with the session which slows the computer. You or he could try checking in that area.

[djohnston]

I have let my friend read this thread and awhile back he disabled the plugins and did not see much of a difference.

You probably will see no difference in disabling java. It should be disabled because it is a huge security risk, almost no websites use it any more, and Oracle has no clue how to properly maintain it. (At least Sun plugged security holes.)

As for the no-script plugin, we are going to play with that one for awhile as we are discovering web sites that will not load when using the no-script plugin, such as FaceBook.

You can set per site privileges with the NoScript plugin. You can also temporarily allow all scripts per web page visited. (The scripts are javascripts. Javascript is a different critter than java.) Just don't "Allow Scripts Globally", as you will defeat the purpose of using NoScript.

Facebook? Really? Hmmm.

[melodie]

Hi,
Once upon a time I had tried Ghostery and it was doing strange things, slowing down Firefox a lot and producing errors. Well I remember I had started firefox from the console to see what was happening and I could see error messages from there. It was about 2 years ago I think, or at least…

Perhaps the plugin has been improved since?

[melodie]

Scrolling seems ok on all web sites that I go to except here....... Still very slow and jerky.  Also bookmarks are still un-Godly slow when scrolling.  To describe how slow scrolling the bookmarks is, picture one bookmark appearing at a time.

For here, the solution will be to move the forum again at some time in a close future. For your bookmarks, you could export them and then erase them all, then to access to the links, open the file with the menu "File > Open a file". (It might be a very big one?)

[djohnston]

Rob,

Try turning off autoscrolling and smooth scrolling if you have them enabled. Edit > Preferences > Advanced section > General tab > Browsing section. Other than that, I don't know why you're having problems. Response here is smooth as glass with Firefox 22.0 and 15 extensions, 1 appearance addon and 9 plugins installed.

[melodie]

I already have smooth scrolling, auto scrolling, and hardware acceleration un-checked.  And no difference.

Hi,

I remember very long ago, at the pclinuxos forum you already met with some issues with the browser. Could you tell us more about the machine where you run it (ram and processor type and speed), and have you tried to do the same things with Midori as well ? Recently I happened to browse with Midori in some old machines and it was always way faster to display a page!

[melodie]

And while starting, using, opening new pages, flash videos : what raises most in htop : the cpu or the ram use ? (You can look the two lines at the top but also hit F6 - "sort by" to see which program uses most cpu, or uses most ram, by the selection in the left side bar which appears once F6 pressed.

If it is ram which is mostly used then adding 1 GB ram to the machine might help - I would suppose it is possible to upgrade the ram…

It looks like it is possible:
http://panam.acer.com/acerpanam/notebook/0000/Acer/Aspire5100/Aspire5100sp2.shtml

RAM / Max RAM   1 GB / 4 GB using DDR2 533/667 soDIMM modules