Firefox is pounding my system what should I do

Question

I'm running the latest version of firefox 17.0.1 on ubuntu 12.10 on a Acer Aspire One 722 Netbook. It has an amd dual core C60 processor and 2GB RAM.

Output from top

As you can see, firefox is absolutely killing my system, it responds really slowly and opening tabs is a royal pain. I have on an average 4-5 open tabs at a given time. Is there something that I can do to make my browsing experience more zippy?

Additionally I run the following addons

Firebug
HTTPS Everywhere
Ad block plus

What do you see with Firebug disabled? You can put that information in your question. — , Dec 05 '12 at 16:42
please disable your other addons as well and see if it makes any difference. Otherwise, everyone will blame the add-ons. :) — ImaginaryRobots, Dec 05 '12 at 16:47
Sadly the memory usage is kind of normal with Firefox. No idea about the CPU usage though. — André Stannek, Dec 05 '12 at 16:52
You can review this answer with options concerning to your problem. — Lucio, Dec 05 '12 at 17:06

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 05 '12 at 16:55

It's possible that something in your browser profile is causing the problem. One possible solution is to use the fairly new "reset firefox" process, which will create a new firefox profile for you with most of your settings preserved.

Warning: not all settings will be preserved, read the link below carefully first!

At the top of the Firefox window, click the Help menu and select Troubleshooting Information.
Click the Reset Firefox button in the upper-right corner of the Troubleshooting Information page.
To continue, click Reset Firefox in the confirmation window that opens.
Firefox will close and be reset. When it's done, a window will list the information that was imported. Click Finish and Firefox will open. That's it – you're done!

More information:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems#os=linux&browser=fx17

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 05 '12 at 16:56

It is a pretty well known fact Firefox is not the lightest browser in terms of system resources.

You had a few options in my opinion on different browsers to use.

I personally use the offical Google Chrome because it comes bundled with its own version of Flash that always works so no fuss. It also has it's own version of a pdf reader.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/

We also have Midori which is a light browser, but I haven't used it extensively so can't tell you what it is like.

http://twotoasts.de/index.php/midori/

I have taken you advice and installed chrome, it seems to be better in terms of performance right now.
I think I 'll come back to firefox after a couple of releases. I like it a lot but lets see. — nikhil, Dec 07 '12 at 18:25

Firefox is pounding my system what should I do

2 Answers2