Firefox: General Performance (v2.x)

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I’m curious to know if anyone else has had usability issues with FX2. Among the many things I encountered after installing FX2:

• Loss of mouse wheel for scrolling after several tabs were opened
• Exceptionally high memory usage at times
• Lack of responsiveness to user input
• Occasional crashes with the Windows Media plugin[/list]No, it was not my extensions. The loss of the mouse’s extended buttons was particularly irritating, as I’m used to scrolling with the wheel. Removing FX2 and stepping back to 1.5 resolved nearly all of the performance issues, even with a nearly identical set of extensions.

  Load times have always been slow, but I notice this very little as I leave the browser window open constantly and do not have the joy of waiting for it to load every time I want to use it.

  What has been the experience of others? Positive, negative, no change? Comments encouraged, don’t be shy.

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No change here, apart from perhaps a slightly longer startup time, and a setting with tabs I haven’t quite sorted. No regrets from this side of the pond.

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Me neither, Mark. The only one of your concerns that I haven’t checked is the memory use thing. I’ve not thought to open the Task Mgr window to see what’s happening. I still don’t have any extensions running. I have a cordless optical Logitech and the scroll wheel works OK.

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I have not encountered any of the issues you mentioned. I do not use a mouse wheel, however, so my experience does not speak to that particular problem. In general terms, I’ve been happy with the performance of Ver 2 for the 2+ months I’ve been using it.

Paul

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I rarely monitor memory usage but I have not noticed any of the other issues you have.

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Interesting to see. The lack of problems from others, that is. I don’t really have a baseline to compare to either, as most of the FF installations around me are 1.x versions.

I suspect something wonky elsewhere on my machine where this has cropped up; even more interesting is that after installing 1.5x I still have the 2.x control panel. “About” reports the proper version, as does the EXE… maybe it’s my user profile that’s beat up. But that still doesn’t explain why rolling back to a previous version has helped so much.

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You are not the only one with problems. I gave up on 2.x and used Opera for a while but missed the ad blocking so I did a clean (deleted all Mozilla folders and used a reg cleaner) install of 1.5.0.9 and my favorite extensions and have not regretted it. Everything performs faster and more stable without question. I know a few of my friends are experiencing stability issues. The only way to explain it is that FF2.x is a bit “hinky” for many.

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I gave up on 2.x and used Opera for a while but missed the ad blocking

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Slightly OT, but I couldn’t resist…

sinjin, the latest version of opera (9.10) has an excellent “content” blocker , if you’ve not looked at it lately, I’d recommend another go.

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Thanks for the info. After looking at the content blocking in Opera I am trying to figure a simple automated way to add and update items as is done in FF with the Filter Set G auto update. Opera is faster and scales everything on a web page that FF1.x or 2.x is not able to do which is important to me as my screens are high res (1920×1200 and 1680×1050 for my old laptop). I guess I am just looking for the best features of each browser to make my personal “ultimate”.

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Having bitten the bullet & moved up to FF 3, I have no regrets & no memory issues. OTOH your favorite extensions may not have been rewritten to run on it…….

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I’ve haven’t noticed any real difference in performance either way; my only problem is that I can’t seem to get the “British” English dictionary to load properly so keep getting red underlines for perfectly acceptable words when typing in a text box (and similarly some incorrectly spelt words show up as fine).

On my home PC I only have something like 119 MB of RAM so I frequently have problems with apps using lots of memory. I’m aware that Firefox is fairly memory-hungry but I haven’t noticed FF2 being any worse than previous versions – if anything, I’ve had fewer problems with it. (Incidentally, I ordered some additional RAM the other day so hopefully all my problems will disappear soon ).

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There is a bug report for the loss of mouse wheel scrolling – Bug 364518 [Core:Widget: Win32]-mouse wheel stopped working since Fx 2.0.0.1 [Win]

The bug has been shown as fixed for Firefox 2.0.0.2 which has a tentative shipping date of 1st February.

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Currently using IE7
1. It takes 20 to 30 seconds to open and display the Access board, get Waiting for http://www.wopr.com

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I have no explanation for the difference, but using Internet Explorer 7, I get the times you give for FireFox 2…

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Do you have the Phishing Filter enabled in IE & disabled in FF? Have you installed The computer may respond very slowly as the Phishing Filter evaluates Web page contents in Internet Explorer 7?

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks for that reference Joe. I wasn’t experiencing the drastic slowdowns that Support4John was, but IE7 was certainly slower than FF. After I applied this patch, IE7 speed improved noticeably.

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Automatic Website Checking was off

I applied IE7 update you suggested, without mush of an improvement

I will be visiting Woodys with FoxFire, each click of the mouse snaps through screens like I

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What ever works best for you is fine. FWIW, you must have some other IE addin or some malware running. I see the same sorts of times with IE as you do with FF. There is definitely something amiss.

Joe

--Joe

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I run the following several times a week

Ad-Aware SE Personal
Spybot – Search & Destroy
AVG Free Edition Test Center
Norton AntiVirus Auto-Protect
Microsoft Malicious Software Removel Tool

How can I check for IE addins ?

Thanks, John

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The Programs tab of Tools | Internet Options has a button “Manage add-ons”.

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These are the add-ins that are enabled, does anything look suspicious?

Thanks, John

Adobe PDF Reader
Citrix ICA Client
Java Plug-in 1.3.1_01
McciUtilsRegistry Class
Microsoft RDP Client Control (redist)
MUWebControl Class
Performance Viewer ActiveX Control
QuickTime Object
RealPlayer G2 Control
Shockwave Flash Object
Windows Media Player
XML HTTP 3.0

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I don’t know what McciUtilsRegistry is, the rest looks OK.

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