spugbrap’s blog

This has been going on for way too long. It definitely started after Google released the new interface for gmail, but it didn’t happen immediately. Now, I’m not blaming Firefox, and I’m not blaming Google. I’m 95% certain that it’s the result of conflicts between one or more of my extensions. I’m always changing up my extensive (hehe) lineup of extensions, and many of those extensions dramatically impact the way the browser works. I love web development extensions, debugging tools, power toys, etc.

Thankfully, I recently read an entry on Mishoo’s blog, which started out describing some [presumably completely unrelated] Firefox performance issues, and ended with a short, positive review of Safari. I decided to give it a try, for curiosity’s sake. I tried Safari when the Windows version was first released, and I remember not being impressed, to say the least. I don’t remember what I didn’t like, but I do remember uninstalling it immediately, so it must have been pretty bad. I don’t use Opera every day, but I do respect it enough to keep it installed and reasonably up-to-date.

Anyways, I tried the newest version of Safari, version 3.0.4, and was pretty impressed. The interface was attractive, simple, and fairly intuitive. Just what one might expect from Apple, I guess. I’m not a big Apple fan; I do not own an iPod or an iPhone, I don’t use iTunes, and have never owned a Mac. But even I know that Apple has a reputation for attractive, simple, and intuitive products.

Using Safari hardly felt different from using Firefox, to me. Almost all I do miss my Firefox extensions, though, and Safari’s Bookmarks menu leaves a lot to be desired. But it is fast, and I almost all the websites I’ve been to have looked and acted just fine. Best of all, it doesn’t crash when I close gmail!

So, where I had been using Firefox for 99% of my personal browsing and Internet Explorer for 1%, I now find myself splitting that 99% pretty equally between Safari and Firefox (and IE for 1%, since some sites just demand it).

One of these days I’ll probably try running Firefox in Safe Mode, and if closing gmail doesn’t crash it, I’ll start disabling one extension after another, until I find the culprit. For now, though, I’m content using Safari part of the time.

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.

As a professional web application developer, I’m well aware of the challenges involved in coding for multiple browsers (and, even worse, older/buggier versions of those browsers). I also hate it when a website won’t behave the way I want it to, so I often end up viewing the source with FireBug, then messing around with the code.

If I just need to “fix” it on a one-time basis, I’ll just edit it with FireBug, but if I need it to behave better every time I visit the site, I’ll write a GreaseMonkey script (Incidentally, I use Platypus to generate a lot of my GM scripts. So easy!).

Sometimes, in the course of viewing/hacking up their code, I run across funny things that developers left in there. Here are a few of them that I’ve run across, which express the designers/developers’ browser preferences.

From viewing the source of a last.fm page:

<span class="iesucks" style="display: block">&nbsp;</span>>

[I just liked their css class name]

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A friend sent this next one to me a couple months ago. I went and tried it, at the time, and I got the error message. But they seem to have fixed it since then. Anyways, this online icon maker page, when viewed in IE, would throw a javascript error when you moved your mouse over the editor component on the page.The funny part was the error message:

'shitty_IE_needs_this' is undefined

Ooh, I just noticed that this site was featured on my favorite geek humor blog, Worse Than Failure (formerly known as The Daily WTF). They’ve got a screenshot of it, so you can still see how silly it looked.

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This last one was not found in source code, so it may or may not have been written by developers, but it sounds to me like it was. From Google Reader’s FAQ (bold/italics added for emphasis):

15. What are Google Reader’s system requirements?

For the best user experience, Google Reader requires an up-to-date browser. We recommend that you use Firefox (download: Windows Mac Linux) or Safari (download: Mac), but Internet Explorer will work too (download: Windows).

The IE Tab Firefox Extension is awesome! It allows you to open the current page in a new tab, rendered by the Internet Explorer engine.

Although most sites work fine in Firefox, it’s an unfortunate fact of life that some sites are designed to work with Internet Explorer only. To deal with this, I’ve been using the IE View Firefox Extension, which allows you to open the current page in an Internet Explorer window.

It allows you to define a list of sites that will always open in IE, which is useful if you use Firefox as your primary browser, but frequently need to use some IE-only sites.

This new IE Tab extension allows you to configure the same kind of list.. sites that will always open in an IE Tab. It even supports Ctrl-leftclick to open the current IE Tab into a new Internet Explorer window, using the IE View extension! I highly recommend both of these extensions.

For several months, my profile on my home desktop PC was behaving strangely. Over time, the one EXPLORER.EXE process kept growing and growing in resource usage (memory + handles + everything else, it seemed), until eventually it would crash. If I logged out once in a while, and logged back in, I got a fresh EXPLORER.EXE instance with no memory leak. This was not an ideal solution, but it worked for a while.

Well, I recently read an article in the IEBlog, which announced a beta version of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. This toolbar is long overdue, and although I still prefer the Web Developer Toolbar extension for Firefox, this is a big step in the right direction! They do share some similar features, and I use both every day now.

I installed it on my work laptop just fine, but when I tried to install it on my home PC, the toolbar did not show up in IE. I logged in with my wife’s profile, and she (someone who doesn’t need such a toolbar) could open it just fine. But not me. So, I poked around for quite a while, using various tools such as these 3 freeware tools from Sysinternals: Filemon, Regmon, and ProcessExplorer.

I sat there and compared my laptop with my desktop, with all unnecessary processes stopped or filtered, and tried to watch the effects of toggling the toolbar on and off (On my PC, even though the toolbar would not display, it was listed in the toolbars context menu and could be toggled).

Eventually, I found a major difference. On my laptop, there was one main EXPLORER.EXE process, and then for every Internet Explorer window I had open, there was a separate IEXPLORE.EXE process. On my desktop, there was one EXPLORER.EXE process, and that was it. No matter how many IE windows I had open, it was all running inside one process.

I compared the options in my desktop and laptop network and system settings, because I remembered something in there about launching new processes (in Control Panel Folder Options View, a checkbox called ‘Launch folder windows in a separate process’). That was checked on both machines, but didn’t affect these web browser windows.

So I did some searching to find out how to change this, and eventually found a relevant message thread which, at the end of the thread (of course), referenced a useful solution.
Add this registry value (and the key, too, if it’s not there):

Key:	HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Microsoft\WindowsCurrentVersion\ Explorer\BrowseNewProcess
Value Name:	BrowseNewProcess
Data Type:	REG_SZ (String Value)
Value Data:	Yes

Phew! Adding that key did the trick, solving both my Developer Toolbar problem and my memory leak problem.