Firebug can make Gmail slow
I love the Firebug extension for Firefox. It’s one of those few extensions that I actually use every day. I raved about it when I first found out about it, last year, and I still love it now.
I’ve been noticing that Gmail has been pretty slow, recently, but I assumed it was just related to their recent rollout of IMAP support, or their recent UI improvements.
Then, this morning, I saw this message at the top of my Gmail page (image has been scaled to fit blog content area width):
The “Fix this” link took me to a Gmail Help page: Firebug can make Gmail slow
Google offers two suggestions:
- just disable Firebug for mail.google.com
OR
- turn off XMLHttpRequest logging and network monitoring
A little while later, I was reading Ben Simon’s blog, and saw that he ran into the slow Gmail problem a couple days ago, as well. It appears that he figured out that Firebug was the culprit, even before Google started showing the warning message that I saw. Ben’s solution was simple:
A quick right mouse click on the green checkmark in the bottom right hand corner of my browser, and selecting Disable Firebug is all it took to get reclaim my browsing speed.
I can’t decide which solution I prefer–Gmail’s selective-disabling approaches or Ben’s total-disabling of Firebug. At first, I thought disabling Firebug completely was just crazy talk. But then I started thinking about it, and realized that it would probably speed up my web browsing in general. I could just enable Firebug on those specific occasions when I’m actively debugging webapps.
But, I often find myself using Firebug on sites that I did not specifically go to for debugging purposes, and it’s nice to have Firebug already loaded and ready to let me hack away. So, I think I’ll start with Google’s first suggestion, and try disabling it specifically for the gmail site. While I’m at it, I think I will disable Firebug on iGoogle, too, since it seems to be very Javascript-intensive.
**Update**:
I just noticed that Firebug lets you specifically set which sites you DO want to use it on, as well as the ones you DO NOT want to use it on. Just right click the little green check mark in the bottom right corner of your browser window, and select ‘Allowed Sites’. That pops up a little dialog, which lets you specify whether to Allow or Block Firebug for each site in the list. Neat.
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November 13th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Three days before, I ran into this exact same problem. I suffered for who knows how long with a slow Firefox, till I finally realized that a mistake it was having a debugger on for every page I visit.
Next time, if you could solve these issues just a few days faster, I’d be really appreciative ;-).
-Ben