Firefox and 100% cpu usage

Is there Flash content inside any of your open tabs?

Close Firefox. Delete ~/Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox.plist. Open Firefox.

Install chrome -> Delete firefox -> Done!

cool11 said:

I did it. Problem still persists.

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Quit Firefox. Open Activity Monitor (in Utilities). In the Activity Monitor window, click on %CPU once or twice until the triangle points down. Now start Firefox and watch that column. If the %CPU number becomes large, click on Firefox in the Process Name column and then click Sample Process. Copy the output and post here, or save output and attach here.

Do you have a javascript debugger plugin or extension? Is it up to date?

Try this. Quit Firefox, and then restart it while pressing the option key. This should let you run Firefox in "safe mode", with all add-ons temporarily disabled. Do you still have excessive CPU usage?

what kind of machine are you using? You can download an optimized build for your CPU (intel, intel64, G4 or G5) here: http://firefoxmac.furbism.com/

mariov said:

what kind of machine are you using? You can download an optimized build for your CPU (intel, intel64, G4 or G5) here: http://firefoxmac.furbism.com/

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Great referral. Thanks. I basically stopped using Firefox as my main browser a couple of years ago since it's such a pig on my trusty but rather aged 2005 G4 MacMini. However, when I was using it regularly, there was a lot I liked about it.

Furbism's page on how to find what type of CPU you have is pretty hilarious. Lots of text there, but really all you need to know is Terminal and the word "machine." Classic...

Those are optimized versions of betas and finals. You can download 3.6 or 4 (still beta)

Firefox is Still a PIG!

Well, I downloaded the Furbism optimized versions of Firefox for my machine, a MacMini from 2005 w/1GB of RAM running 10.4.11.

As I said before, there's a lot I like about Firefox, particularly the safety and security add-ons you can get. I don't have a lot of extensions or add-ins: Just WebDeveloper, BetterPrivacy, FlashBlock and SearchStatus. That's it. It's pretty lean.

Now the bad news: Even with this optimized version, Firefox is still a friggin pig. I had 3, maybe 4 tabs open, and the entire application minimized in my dock. IT WAS STILL TAKING over 50% of my CPU.

All my other applications crept to a near-halt.

Is there a decent browser for Mac OS X? I can't try Chrome since it's 10.5 or later only. I had been using Opera v9 for awhile; I tried v10 when it came out and it was a joke. Tried to type in a search phrase in the google window and the beachball took over. Took literally 10 friggin minutes to type in one word. So as far as Opera, v9 is the only option for me, but it acts strangely at times; doesn't even open Blogger sites for example.

OmniWeb was my next browser of choice, but after an initial happy period, it gives me the beachball of death as well if I have 10 or so tabs open.

Safari has become bloated as well, and even though I turn off RSS, TopList and as many extras as I can, it still is a pig much of the time.

This MacMini I have should be enough machine to surf the friggin web. You shouldn't need a damn supercomputer to use the internet. Or am I wrong?

Make sure that you have enough free space on your hard drive. You should have at least 10%--some say 15%--of your hard drive available as free space to ensure that your virtual memory has the headroom that it needs.

MisterMe said:

Make sure that you have enough free space on your hard drive. You should have at least 10%--some say 15%--of your hard drive available as free space to ensure that your virtual memory has the headroom that it needs.

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Thanks. Well, it's an 80 GB internal hard drive on the MacMini. There's still about 30 GB of free space. I mainly use an external 1 TB hard drive for storage. So, it doesn't seem as though that would be an issue.

The Activity Monitor has a couple daemons that are always running which at times gobble up processor overhead, such as TechToolPro daemon, LittleSnitch, CleanApp daemon and DiskWarrior daemon. CleanApp seems to be the most active of those, but for the most part the daemons are pretty dormant most of the time.

I'm also getting just plain freezes intermittently during the course of a day. I can be downloading, surfing, playing audio files, whatever, when suddenly everything freezes for 10 seconds, sometimes longer. I can't even get to my Activity Window to see what's gobbling processor overhead. I just have to wait for everything to unfreeze.

I've done enough diagnostics, permissions repairing, directory structure verifying and repairing to know that nothing is seemingly wrong with my discs. But I still get these freezes and I'm talking about EVERY DAY.

Is Mac OS X.4.11 such a wimp that it can't handle multiple applications or threads running at once? Is RAM a problem (I have 1GIG, which is max for my machine), or is it something else?

woofbow said:

Thanks. Well, it's an 80 GB internal hard drive on the MacMini. There's still about 30 GB of free space. I mainly use an external 1 TB hard drive for storage. So, it doesn't seem as though that would be an issue.

...

I've done enough diagnostics, permissions repairing, directory structure verifying and repairing to know that nothing is seemingly wrong with my discs. But I still get these freezes and I'm talking about EVERY DAY.

Is Mac OS X.4.11 such a wimp that it can't handle multiple applications or threads running at once? Is RAM a problem (I have 1GIG, which is max for my machine), or is it something else?

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The only thing that stands out are all of those maintenance utilities that you are running. I would keep DiskWarrior, but dump the rest. I don't know that any of them are causing problems, but they certainly are not helping.

Shockwawe Flash pluging

Hi, I had the same problem. What worked for me was to deactivate the plugin ShockWave Flash installed in Firefox. - you find it under add-ons..

kaninguf said:

Hi, I had the same problem. What worked for me was to deactivate the plugin ShockWave Flash installed in Firefox. - you find it under add-ons..

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The original post was 3.5 years old. I suspect that whatever problem they had isn't still happening (at least I hope not).

While this is a four year old revived thread, the OP's problem was he was slimming the Firefox binaries. That cause it to go into a loop. The problem could have been solved by not slimming the binary. This is no longer a problem for any user as Mozilla no longer releases Intell/PowerPC universal binaries as it no longer supports PowerPC.