Firefox has been getting flaky. It will get stuck in loops, sucking up all CPU time, hogging humungous amounts of memory, and slowing to a crawl. Plus opening unasked for ad windows. That last is scary, if Firefox will open an ad window just 'cause a website asked it too, it can plant a virus, or do anything else bad that you can imagine. Standard Firefox allows websites to load code into your browser and execute it on your computer. Which is a gaping security hole. This code is called "a script" which doesn't sound so bad, but it is bad.
There is a fix. Get NoScript, a Firefox "extension". Google will find it for you. NoScript blocks all scripts, along with other flaky things like Java. Properly coded websites will continue to work properly. Cheap ass websites, such as blogger, stop working 'cause they rely on scripts to make 'em work. Noscript allows you to re enable scripts for the websites that have to have scripts.
Since installing NoScript on both Trusty Desktop and Antique Laptop the Firefox lockups have ceased, the unasked for ad windows have gone away. Re enabling scripts for the low speed websites that rely upon them is easy.
The Mozilla help pages say good things about Noscript, clearly the Firefox programmers know about NoScript and consider it a good thing.
6 comments:
I noticed many of the same issues with Firefox, but on only one of our computers. (Mine, of course.)
I noticed Firefox would eat up all the CPU cycles on one core of my computer's CPU and would be "dog ass slow". The only remedy was to close Firefox, sometimes using the Task Manager to force it closed because it would take forever to do so sometimes, and restart it.
I have since installed the NoScript extension and the problem has not recurred. I tested it against Instapundit, the one site I knew would get Firefox into that funky state within a few minutes. It's been a few hours now and it's all good.
Thanks for the tip!
That sounds exactly like what Firefox was doing to me. So far Noscript has fixed the problem on both my machines. Funny, I'd never seen any talk about Noscript in the various places I normally websurf. When I googled for "Firefox Lockup" Noscript was practically the first thing to turn up.
I've included this tip in my Sunday post as I know quite a few others that have suffered from the same problem.
Another plus to this extension: websites load a lot faster!
Via WeekendPundit
This is AMAZING! I normally have 20 - 80 tabs open at a time, and I just RIPPED through 50 just now and memory usage was half of what it normally is!
-Skip
GraniteGrok
I've installed this on my machine at work and I kept an eye on both CPU and memory usage. It isn't uncommon for me to have two windows of Firefox open and more than 20 or 30 tabs on each window open. With the scripts blocked CPU usage is just above zero and memory usage is much lower as well.
I like the fact that I can selectively authorize only some scripts to run, either on a one time or every time basis.
I've spread the word at work and more than a couple of my co-workers have state they love being able to use the web without all the dreck showing up on their screens.
This is a great find, Dave!
I've had Noscript running on both Trusty Desktop and Antique Laptop for several days now. It's prevented Firefox lockup, prevented ad windoe3s, and made every thing run faster. A surprising number of websites , blogger, cs.trains, and facebook for example, need scripts to function.
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