The main problem of firefox is in it’s management of content and interfaces that are on the same thread. There is actually an internal work to separate interface and pages content, so if a page consume too much resources, the tab can be closed immediatly by clicking on the close cross button. For now if the content of a page consume too much ressources, the whole browser is sticked like a hudge stone that eat your system ressources. The secondary problem linked to the first is that you can’t know which tab use to much ressources, there is no ‘top’ like plugin or extention that allow to know this and avoir some site or bug report to them or firefox devs.
The big issues of ressources overloading on Firefox come with:
* animation/advertisement that consume lot of resources/cpu and is very tiring at reading page. I use AdBlockPlus to reduce this planet destructive wasted resources.
* .js scripts (performance issues are mostly resolved in firefox 4.0bx), NoScript block all of them and can be enable one by one, or can enable all but some you don’t want. you can accept/refuse some permanently or temporary etc… I generally block all, accept one by one temporarly but the site I go often, and permanently block advertisment and statistics dedicated sites (google-analytics, ad*.com…). Warning, I’m not sure but it seem that by default, it forbids web-fonts, don’t forgive to uncheck forbid @font-face in NoScript options.
* Flash content. (I’m using the flash beta 64bits from 2010/09/27 that is the best solution on 64 bits linux, and don’t suffer too much for that, at the condition I d’ont open 5 or more flash video at the same time (with help from flashblock).
* The add-on FlashVideoReplacer, allow to replace the crashing and slow flash player by your own binary player, by directly streaming the content. You can then choose the format and resolution of the video. Sadly, this only work on some of the most know video website (Youtube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Ustream and some other)
* Page itself, even with NoScript blocking js and flashblock some pages still collapse your system with firefox-3.6x, the baddest thing is that all the tabs are continuously in work, so all will consume ressources. To avoid too much ressources usage, you can use BarTab, that block at start all the old tabs but the last one, so you can use have your old tabs under hand but they will not collaps your system. Since Firefox 4 you don’t need anymore bartab, you can set the same behavior, by adding in about:config, a new integer string with the value of browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0 (using right mouse button => new => integer)
UPDATE, installation of ff-4.0b
You can grab the beta releases from the ftp (public http too) from Mozilla.org :
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/
or faster ftp :
ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/
For the beta release, simply go to the subdir 4.0bX/ (replace X by last beta >=9), choose your operating system (mine is linux-x86_64, but I hope, soon a linux-ARM), then your language version (fr, en or whatever you read).
Then download the tarball. For me, that’s here : ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/linux-x86_64/fr/firefox-4.0b9.tar.bz2.
I personnaly extract the tarball in /opt/ (after removing the previous symbolic link), rename firefox to firefox-4.0b9 (the release version) and make a new link firefox => firefox-4.0b9 during few weeks, until I find it’s more stable than previous one. After that delay I will remove the old one (firefox-4.0b8) :
rm firefox
tar xf firefox-4.0b9.tar.bz2
mv firefox firefox-4.0b9
ln -s firefox-4.0b9 firefox
Then if there wasn’t already one, I create an icon shortcut in the gnome bar, adding the following path for the application :
/opt/firefox/firefox
