2/7/2007
Flash and Firefox CPU usage
I noticed today that Firefox 2.0 on my PowerBook was suddenly incredibly slow. First, I suspected my own code. After I couldn’t think of anything that I had done recently that could possibly cause this, I tried uninstalling half a dozen extensions to no avail. Finally, I found the culprit.
This page often shows a Flash ad (”Pick hot stocks. Win a cool million”) that instantly causes Firefox 2.0 on my PowerBook to use 60-80% of the CPU. Maybe it’s just this Flash ad or maybe it’s all of them to one degree or another. Either way, I don’t care.
Goodbye, Flash. Thanks for playing.
Interestingly, after uninstalling Flash and going back to that page, I still saw that same ad. Turns out that the page detects if you don’t have Flash and if you don’t, it serves up a plain old JPEG file. The JPEG looks exactly the same except that it doesn’t have a moving background. Big freaking deal. I’ll trade some subtle animation effects to get my CPU back.
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I started using FlashBlock lately. By default, it doesn’t load any flash. You can then click on the placeholder if you really do want to see it.
I have noticed the same behaviour with Yahoo Maps on Windows XP. I am careful to close all the browser windows with Flash before locking the computer , otherwise it will run upto 100% CPU after sometime, cause a kernel to panic and crash dump.
I’m using firefox and the flash 9 plugin in Linux, the firefox rendering of the pages and a lot of flash stuff makes everything run slow (95% - 100% cpu usage), damn I have to use windows just to make my cpu happy sometimes XD
anyway, interesting blog