Thank you. That was a good answer.

Firefox without Adblock very shortly after starting use with even a moderate number of commercial pages open will make some attempt to race a CPU core, and will eventually max it out (even with 3.5.2) and become fairly unresponsive (I unfortunately find the same situation with Opera, except that it seems able to remain responsive to the user). Firefox then begins to expand its use of memory (I've had it go nearly all the way to 8 GB) for . . . . what? - there were only a dozen or 15 tabs open. There is nothing that races my CPU (and then fan) as much, or as pointlessly, as the browsers, not video, not heavy I/O. Maybe the devs never run Firefox without Adblock so they see no reason to in any way curtail what the Flash/JavaScript/whatever does after it has done it once. It definitely increases my electricity use, and would therefore run through what a battery is able to provide.

And to think my mod points just ran out.

We'll buy it if matches what we have watched our own system monitors show us about what the browsers are doing with CPU utilization and RAM use over years of using Firefox and Opera.

I might add that, as with any experiment, if the "unknown dude" presents the steps he or she took to do the experiment, and they are reproducible, one can then check to see if the same results are obtained. I'll admit I'm not going to do the experiment, but from a quick skim of the webpage, it looks like enough information is given to copy the experiment. What's your problem? Do you only accept a finding if it's done by a "celebrity", rather than by looking at what was done?

I hadn't thought it through clearly, but you're dead right. Since the rise of all three technologies in these browsers, I've wanted a way to renice (or kill), individually, JavaScript, Flash, swf across the browser or by particular page. THAT would make a nice extension.

You must be using your browser very gently. Have many tabs/windows open, don't control when your JavaScript and/or Flash/Shockwave are running, don't pay attention when a CPU maxes out, and the browsers crash (and race) a lot.

(I also agree with your other responder, as I don't like what the FF developers are or have been doing with location bar, bookmarks, etc. - I don't use them much now, either.)

I'm not disagreeing with the main point of your comment, but

What browser are you using? Crashes are common - say once a week at a minimum. Firefox (along with Opera, and sometimes multimedia players and Java) is an application that in my experience actually makes Linux less stable than modern Windows, because it and the other programs I mention somehow get some hook into X, and when they go, X is badly affected as well. (At its worst, I've had it bring the Linux kernel to a grinding halt - a reproducible and infuriating bug two or three Ubuntus back.)

Performance has improved tremendously from FF 3 to 3.5, and over the last few releases of Opera - but it's still nowhere as good as it should be - open a bunch of tabs, and after a bit you'll be maxing out at least one core.

Sorry, I've used Opera with many tabs open as well, and it develops pretty much the same problems as Firefox (and I have no idea what its threading/process structure is) - it freezes frequently, doesn't seem to then accept a process STOP, but only KILL (Linux), and uses huge amounts of RAM. While Opera 10 may have improved, if you think the older ones were better than Firefox, then you weren't (from the perspective of my experience with it) using it heavily.

Seriously.

And you can take the ;) off the end of the sentence. They really do measurably raise my electric bill.

An excellent point to consider. I routinely have 2 to 3 times as many tabs and windows open as that, and JavaScript and Shockwave often bring one processor to 100% if not watched. I now have to as a regular thing have a system monitor open to watch the CPU usage for Firefox (and Opera and any other browser I have open). There's even something else in Firefox that runs on and on, as I've recently have a few webpages max out one core using Firefox 3.5 on 64-bit Linux, where Shockwave ads supposedly won't run, with the JavaScript off and yet it races. The couple times I've tried Chrome I've watched it use more and more of the machine over time.

I'm all for Firefox going to multi-process, but they really need to work on something that limits the browser processing - if I'm not looking at a page that page should basically be "off", not doing anything until I come back to that tab, as is the case with a text processor or even an audio or video player when it's paused. How can a browser be the OS when it cannot control its CPU usage or match such to the tasks the user is doing actively? Pages not being looked at must go into the background as far as CPU utilization is concerned unless a job is specifically being run by the user.

This one's mine. How about 200, real pages. None of the browsers can really handle this - they all crash after awhile. The nightly builds of Firefox are probably the best, but JavaScript, and even just the Shockwave ads with JavaScript turned off, can bring a processor and desktop nearly to a halt. Let's go, developers - we need a switch to turn that other stuff off, and a way to isolate pages in the browser (and applications running in them) in isolated controllable processes.