[TriLUG] Problems with Firefox v29

[Scott G. Hall]

On 05/22/2014 01:49 PM, Ric Moore wrote:
> On 05/22/2014 05:45 AM, Matt Flyer wrote:
>>> On May 19, 2014, at 12:51 PM, "Peter Neilson" <neilson at windstream.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Can't print PDFs anymore--Ubuntu 12.04.
>> For what it's worth I had the same problem with Windows the other day.
>>
>> I'm becoming increasingly disappointed with Firefox. Except for its ad block
>> capability, which isn't working as well anymore either, I would dump it.
>
> When I installed track blocker it sped up FF a LOT! It's amazing the overhead
> the user has to provide just to read some html page that is loaded with
> trackers. Usually it's the tracker pages that are slow and/or fail to respond
> ...so you sit there idled forever. Ric
>

The problem I am experiencing is the Linux resources that are consumed. My older
laptop, with a 1.2GHz Centrino and 2GB RAM runs great with Mint 13's version of
Ubuntu 12.04 -- up until the recent Firefox upgrade everything was snappy with
even the various multimedia plugins.

As up Firefox 29, my system's resources are packed to the gills, page faults for
memory swapping taking up most of the physical time, process swaps are slow, and
interrupt responsiveness is sluggish. Kill Firefox and everything is snappy again.

I suscpect that the new menu and toolbar formats hide underlying structural
changes in the rendering code base that has been rewritten and nowhere near
optimized yet. A reading of the patch descriptions in the code that have been
made public support that theory. I don't care if mobile devices are all the rage
right now, there was no need to change the main rendering base to change the
look-and-feel.

Now I am looking for a browser with the features of FF #26 or #27, including a
lighter memory model and operational footprint.

-- 
Scott G. Hall
Raleigh, NC, USA
Scott at HallComm-Inc.Com