Frigging Firefox

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Sometimes Firefox takes a little half second nap ever about ten or fifteen seconds. This is annoying on its own, but when playing videos, it is a pain in the ass.

Click on a Flash video. YouTube, LiveLeak and any number of other places use these players. I've poked around on the internet and found that I'm not the only one who has this trouble. No one is doing any forensics. Here goes.

• Removed all the extensions I do not use every day.
• Removed noscript that allows you to not run script by default. You have to allow pages to run script one at a time. Saves some trouble over the long haul.
• Removed FlashBlock. Same as noscript, but for flash.
• Restart Firefox.
• Problem solved.

Not exactly. The problem goes away when you restart Firefox for a while. This means it is some kind of resource issue. Something gets tired of holding up its end of the log and shit starts sagging.

So, how do I know it is just restarting Firefox that fixed it? Because I put FlashBlock and NoScript right back in Firefox. Restarted and the problem is still gone. Bad news. It would be nice if it had broken again. That would have told me that one of those two extensions was the culprit and it would be little effort figuring out which.

I also removed Grease Monkey extension. I have in the back of my mind that this guy just might be the bad guy. I don't think so because it is a more rare extension and too many people complain about this problem.

I have not put Grease Monkey back on the machine. It is time to wait and continue with my normal hammer of the box until the problem represents. Then, run without one of the extensions and repeat. Then run without any extensions and repeat. Then Try a different browser. My God, this may stop me from using Firefox all together. Switching is not bad. Hell, I have IE 6 working to a point under Linux. Someone else did all the leg work, but I installed it and that counts in Windows.