Firefox using lots of CPU, being slowwwww

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Recently, Firefox on my Mac is lagging quite a lot and using up too much CPU when I scroll through pages and click links. I've already tried clearing the cache, clearing cookies, and disabling all my add-ons, none of which make a lasting difference.

Any other suggestions? It's getting really annoying.

It could be an issue with you graphic drivers.
However, I had a similar problem on Windows when tabbing alot on youtube, however my solution probably wouldn't help in your situation (I switched to Linux).
I don't know the exact cause, to why this happened on Windows, but since I switched to Linux (with 64-bit flashplayer, yay!) I became trouble-free.

It's probably worth to question, do you use flash player on the websites that behave badly?
It could very well be a plugin causing these issues as well.

I have NoScript blocking all flash ads and such and I currently have no tabs open with streaming videos or anything playing.

If you're using Snow Leopard, be aware that it has severe memory leaks. Given any prolonged uptime, your browser will be taking several hundreds of megabytes of RAM. The only solution when that happens is to close and reopen your browser.

Are any Java applets running? Those tend to ramp up the CPU pretty badly, since the Java implementation on Mac sucks. (or perhaps it's that Java in general sucks?)

I do indeed run Snow Leopard. What you're saying makes sense actually, it does get worse the longer the browser's open. Is it the OS itself that has the memory leaks, then? I'm surprised they haven't sorted that by now, it's been out for ages...



Nope, I rarely ever let Java applets run on my computer, don't trust them.

I'm not sure. It seems to happen across all applications, but especially with web browsers. The memory management in SL in general is just terrible. It is way too common an occurrence that my system memory is maxed out and my computer comes to a grinding halt. 4GB should be plenty.

No idea why they haven't fixed it. Apple's line has always been that Snow Leopard is the fastest and lightest OS X they've ever released, and they don't seem to want to admit that that is the exact opposite of true.

The same thing is happening on Windows Vista. Firefox has become a real pig. I have no idea what to do about it so I started using Google Chrome.

ruveyn

I've been using SwiftFox lately. I like it.

it's an issue with firefox, not snow leopard. Try using Safari or Chrome. Both are superior alternatives to Firefox.

Exactly. This was my problem with Windows 7 too.

...When using OSX.

EDIT: Browsers are personal preferences, and therefore one cannot be superior to another.

Last edited by TheSpecialKid on 04 Nov 2010, 1:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'd move to Chrome if they had a decent alternative to all the add-ons I use. As it stands, however, they don't.

Plus, I'm pretty skeptical of Google these days. I don't want them collecting data on all my browsing.

I've been having problems with Firefox becoming slow on Vista. Over the last few weeks I've been getting lots of problems when first connecting to sites with messages "Unable to connect to server", "Connection timeout" etc. This evening I've uninstalled Firefox and reinstalled it from scratch with a new profile and got all the add-ons again. It definitely seems more responsive. I'll have to see how it fares over the next few days to see if all the timeout issues have gone away.

I do like the Firefox browser because of the Ad-blocking and NoScript features. I tried Internet Explorer earlier this evening on WP and it was a pig. Wrong Planet is effectively unusable for me on dial-up internet with IE because it is just too slow downloading all the graphic content of the adverts to be viable.

use google chrome it's fast and will not hog cpu or ram and it's simple!
go to google.com/chrome

Safari on my Mac generally eats 600-700MB of memory. Chrome anywhere I use it is a massive memory hog.

Even so, Chrome is faster than Firefox these days. It was not always thus. Firefox used to be nimble.

ruveyn