Flash-heavy sites; UGH! Don't blame Firefox.

Walter Dnes waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org
Mon Sep 23 06:58:29 UTC 2013


  I'm in the process of switching from Firefox to UZBL as my primary web
browser.  It's a steep learning curve, as in "everything you know is
wrong", but I digress.  Firefox often hung for minutes at a time on my
old Core2 Duo (2 cores).  On my relatively new Intel i5 (4-cores), I'd
often see loads between 2.5 and 3, with one webforum main page and 2
forum threads open and a few spreadsheets open!?!?  Other programs were
slower than I felt they should be.

  UZBL shows a similar usage.  But one major advantage of UZBL is that
each and every tab is actually a separate instance.  When I ran "top" I
could see multiple instances of "uzbl-core".  Most were 1 to 2 %CPU
usage.  But 2 or 3 were bouncing between 75% and 105%!!!  It was a bit
of grunt work, but I eventually figured out which forum's tabs to close
to kill those 100% cpu hogs.

  On further investigation, I noticed that one forum was running Flash
video ads continuously!!!  On each tab!!!  It's a bit clunky, but it is
possible to run instances of UZBL with different config files.  So I
decided to default to disabling all plugins (including Flash).  For now,
I'm testing UZBL without plugins, and using Opera for sites that I
really want/need to show Flash (Youtube/Live365/NHLGameCenter).  From
now on I'll do either that or try to figure out how to elegantly run
separate instances of UZBL with different config files (i.e. plugins
enabled/disabled).

  It really frees up system resources.  Currently, I have the offending
forum open with 3 forum threads, a few spreadsheets, and I'm listening
to Live365 internet radio on Opera.  And I'm also composing this email
in mutt, using vim as the editor.  top is bouncing around mostly between
.05 and .15 and the machine is nice and zippy.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
--
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