Adobe’s Flash plugin for Firefox has never offered the kind of quality performance that the equivalent plugin for Internet Explorer has but at least it handled most Flash based video fairly well. However, somewhere around the 14th of April the nightly builds of Firefox 3 began to seize up on websites that incorporated any sort of Flash based media at all be it video, images or advertisements. Sites that I had been able to view previously would lock up the browser completely and only a “Kill Process” via the Windows XP Task Manager would stop the CPU from having conniption fits about being maxed out at 99%.
This was annoying to say the least and more than troubling. What had been a consistently rock stable, memory friendly new version of Firefox was now no longer able to handle Flash based media? Off to the forums I go along with several other testers and early adopters as I found out when I got there.
Strangely enough I had had the presence of mind to test these sites using Opera 9.5 beta which I keep around for testing website rendering issues between browsers and all the sites that were killing the nightly builds were showing fine in Opera. Since Opera and Firefox use the same plugin this told me that something had changed in the nightly builds that was causing this problem. And since I’m not familiar with programming (yet, can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Watch me), it was up to convincing the Dev’s that this was indeed a serious problem.
I’ve got to hand it to the developers at Mozilla, the problem had been filed on 4/20/08 as a new bug, verified and confirmed and set as blocking Gecko 1.9 meaning Firefox 3. After only a couple days of digging around the code base of the latest nightly builds the developers at large found the problem and had it solved as of yesterday’s update for Minefield (name for any developer’s build of Firefox). Just a bit impressive if you ask me.
Certain types of Flash based media still comes up choppy and dropping frames as usual but that’s more due to the inherent problems of the Flash plugin for Firefox and Opera than anything browser related. I’m just glad that Firefox 3 is back to being a class act.
And kudos to the Dev’s at Mozilla. Nice work folks!
Terry Trippany,
Besides the poor quality of Adobe’s Flash plugin for Firefox, over the past few weeks I’ve found out that different video cards and their respective drivers make a huge difference with the performance of Firefox. Case in point, I worked on a computer that had an AMD 3200+ single core processor (P4 3.0 Ghz equivalent), plenty of memory and a middle of the road XGI Technologies video card w/128 Mb that had terrible Flash performance in Firefox. The same Firefox setup on a P4 2.5Ghz single core processor with an old ATI Radeon video card w/64 Mb exhibited very good Flash performance. That’s as far as I’ve currently gotten though. A plethora of various test computers I have not.
Unfortunately, the problem with certain types of script powered portions of a site (especially news tickers) is an age old problem that mostly affects Firefox but also IE and Opera in lesser ways.
Hi Kirk,
Agreed, especially considering that Firefox has another annoying issue where it randomly decides to suck up 100% CPU on a whim. I believe, but have not confirmed, that this is related to blocking pop ups for some news sites that I visit.
The multi-threading capabilities are also a little suspect. At times I see that tabs fail to load if another previously loaded tab stalls on a page load. While I realize that this could be an issue rooted in Windows I find that I have had more problems recently than in past versions.
Perhaps the 3.1 version of Firefox will be better. It’s no surprise that Google’s chrome is attracting much attention. People wouldn’t look to new browsers if the one they were using simply worked as expected.
This saddens me because I really prefer the Mozilla line to others. I wonder if Flock has similar issues.
Terry,
100% CPU:
Now the pop-up blocker is something I hadn’t thought of. Does turning off the pop-up blocker stop this from happening? I’d be interested in how you arrived at that and if you’re able to confirm this. I’ve been pursuing various high CPU usage problems for some time now.
Multi-threading:
Unfortunately, Firefox 3.0.* runs everything in a single process although 3.1 is supposed to have multi-threading for Java script. I believe that, currently, only IE 8.0 beta * and now Chrome are the only browsers that have multi-threading/multi-process capability.
I get the feeling that Google with it’s Chrome browser is mostly trying to “push the browser market” as it were (like they have had a habit of doing in other areas) to higher standards and capabilities. If they pare down the “middle man” somewhat, meaning IE , and level out the playing field a bit while they’re at it then that’s all to the good, yes? Then folks will have their choice of browsers depending on their needs and personalities and all will have equal capabilities. Does that make sense?
As of today, FF3 and the latest version of flash still don’t play nicely. Flash consumes tons of CPU, and rarely a mysterious memory leak props up taking up all my RAM =(
I get significantly better Flash performance on IE6 . . .
Yup, funny thing, I had to kill Firefox just to reply to your post. It was consuming 100% CPU because of a flash issue.
This is disappointing.
Hey Terry,
Now that’s really strange since there’s no Flash based media anywhere on this post or page itself. Unless you had another tab open to a website that used a lot of Flash based media at the same time, I think in this case, that your high CPU usage might be attributed to something else (not that I’m debunking what you say about Firefox and Flash problems).
Hi,
Yeah, the flash was on a page I was looking at when I received the e-mail notification of your post. – Trip