Monday, November 05, 2007

Bitten By FireBug

Over the last few weeks I noticed that Firefox was running slower and slower. It seemed that every time I visited Gmail, the CPU would spike to 100% and stay there for way too long. I found myself restarting the browser more and more often.

It got bad. How bad? So bad, I found that IE was a faster browser to use than Firefox and nearly switched to it. Yeah, that bad.

The it hit me last night - I should do something about it. Surely I'm not the only person in the world who's noticed Firefox is crawling these days. I did a Google search or two and found nothing. Then I actually spent a few minutes thinking about my problem (I know, a crazy idea).

After about 30 seconds it hit me, Firebug!. I had installed and turned on Firebug for all pages. The result was that every page I browsed had debugging turned on. This debugging is handy, but is naturally going to slow down sites. This is especially true for JavaScript heavy sites, like Gmail.

A quick right mouse click on the green checkmark in the bottom right hand corner of my browser, and selecting Disable Firebug is all it took to get reclaim my browsing speed.

Now if I could just wash off this emotional stain IE left on me, I'd be all set.

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