uber.la

So let me know if this sounds familiar to any of you.

I open FF 3.0.5 and before I'm 3 clicks anywhere, the beachball of death [Mac reference, for windows folks please imagine the hourglass tumbling and tumbling.] pops up and hypnotizes me to sleep before I regain control of the browser.

I have cut my plugins back to the bare essentials.
Unhide Passwords 1.2.3
Delicious Bookmarks 2.1.018
Customize Google 0.76 (this one is amazing!)
Google Gears 0.5.4.2
1Password 2.9.7
AutoAuth 1.3

So I am not seeing any big overhead load on my browser. I've turned off all extra toolbars.

And I found this crazy location [Notice the helpful URL for finding your Flash prefs settings: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html] for editing my Flash Preferences on the Adobe site. Now that is a boneheaded place to put the access to your preferences. Maybe Adobe has been inpsired by Google Desktop and Search settings prefs, but it is a bad idea and I hope my two buddies who work for Adobe read my blog. [Oh heck, I'll send this post to them when I'm done.]

So I am in testing mode. Just minutes ago I killed Flash's ability to cache .swf files. Done! Call the preferences police, I'm guilty. Click, one little pref file, that I can't get to unless I'm a maniac, a "help I can't make flash work right" seeker on Adobe's help site, or I am subscribed to someone's blog who finds the offending prefs control panel on Adobe's site? [Does any one else find this REALLY PROBLEMATIC?] Thanks to The AeonFlux RubyOnRails dev blog for finding and outting this little beast.

So I will watch my FF instance and my GEARS access and see if the beach ball of death bounces back on stage to inhibit my browsing experience. And of course, I will let you know.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/firefox-SLOW

+++

Update 8 hours later. I have still hit significant beachball moments. I am going to disable GEARS and see how things go.

Tags: .swf download, adobe flash help, adobe support documentation, aeonflux, bare essentials, beachball of death, firefox toolbars, flash cache, flash preferences, flash work, google desktop preferences, google gears, google gears cache, location notice, mac reference, posterous, rubyonrails developer, search settings, swf, swf cached, windows hourglass