6 ms·

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 l

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. More listed here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/

melling 16y ago
I knew it! :-). Run it with ExtJS and you'll start to go crazy.
pbz 16y ago
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.
- pcwalton 16y ago
  Mozilla developer here - If you have steps to reproduce, I'd love to hear them and I'll get them forwarded to the proper people.
  - pbz 16y ago
    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.
- ronnoch 16y ago
  The memory problem is pretty serious. I've been using the Memory Restart addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/memory-restart/ 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.
  - maxxxxx 16y ago
    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.
  - planckscnst 16y ago
    Wow. I leave FF open for weeks with many tabs on a netbook with 1GB of memory.
    - coolgeek 16y ago
      hmmm... I have to reboot daily - sometimes more than once a day - on an ASUS Eee 1GB running XP
viraptor 16y ago
I like the irony of this being #7: FastestFox - Browse Faster: 31% slower...
- mattmanser 16y ago
  Stumbleupon's 11th, wtf is that doing at startup?
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    Stumbling about aimlessly, of course!
prsimp 16y ago
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.
scorpioxy 16y ago
I have firebug and other development related addons in their own profile because of this. My regular browsing is done in the default profile and the development work is done with the development profile.
EdiX 16y ago
I wish that list wouldn't be about a metric I couldn't care less about but unfortunately everyone else seems to only care about start up time :(

melling 16y ago

I knew it! :-). Run it with ExtJS and you'll start to go crazy.

pbz 16y ago

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.

pcwalton 16y ago
Mozilla developer here - If you have steps to reproduce, I'd love to hear them and I'll get them forwarded to the proper people.
- pbz 16y ago
  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.
ronnoch 16y ago
The memory problem is pretty serious. I've been using the Memory Restart addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/memory-restart/ 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.
- maxxxxx 16y ago
  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.
- planckscnst 16y ago
  Wow. I leave FF open for weeks with many tabs on a netbook with 1GB of memory.
  - coolgeek 16y ago
    hmmm... I have to reboot daily - sometimes more than once a day - on an ASUS Eee 1GB running XP

viraptor 16y ago

I like the irony of this being #7: FastestFox - Browse Faster: 31% slower...

mattmanser 16y ago
Stumbleupon's 11th, wtf is that doing at startup?
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Stumbling about aimlessly, of course!

prsimp 16y ago

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.

scorpioxy 16y ago

I have firebug and other development related addons in their own profile because of this. My regular browsing is done in the default profile and the development work is done with the development profile.

EdiX 16y ago

I wish that list wouldn't be about a metric I couldn't care less about but unfortunately everyone else seems to only care about start up time :(