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