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- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Total BS.
I'm a longtime Mozilla and Firefox user on Windows and Linux, but I rarely use Firefox on OS X. Firefox has some serious issues on OS X, but this isn't one of them.
This is just an artifact of how older Carbon apps work. Appleworks does the same thing. And the Firefox people are in the process of upgrading their framework to use more modern Cocoa APIs anyway.
Furthermore, there is no slowdown. It's just a low-priorty thread that spins while tracking the mouse. That's just how classic Mac OS did things before OS X. It's not an issue for laptop users or anyone else. - ashevilletech, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Note to self:
"Don't hold down the mouse button in Firefox, which will slow down my CPU until I let go, as if I could do anything else while the mouse button is depressed in the first place". - Midnightbrewer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"This is just an artifact of how older Carbon apps work. Appleworks does the same thing. And the Firefox people are in the process of upgrading their framework to use more modern Cocoa APIs anyway."
I knew this sounded familiar. Anybody who used the mac pre-OSX will recognize this particular issue. It's a legacy issue carried over by the Carbon framework, it would seem. Sounds like Apple might want to look into this, too. - grammarpolice, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Note to self:
"Don't hold down the mouse button in Firefox, which will slow down my CPU until I let go, as if I could do anything else while the mouse button is depressed in the first place".
Well lets see, Just because you (a human being) cannot do anything else while the mouse button is depressed the computer maybe doing other things. I encode movies of my own and I can only imagine my FPS going crazy while surfing the net.
(not trying to be an smart ass) - chrislewis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2From the bugzilla report:
Comment #57 From Ray Booysen 2005-12-01 02:49 PST [reply]
This bug has been confirmed. Please do not add comments stating that you can
reproduce the bug. It is known about. - stewacide, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It does suck that FF behaved like a Carbon app' tho. E.g. no services support. The dead give-away is how windows can be resized right to the bottom of the screen...
- DJSdotcom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Here's the Bugzilla link: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141710
- manfesto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This is a rather significant bug, and I can't believe that the bugzilla reports have been around three years! Does anybody have an idea of the source of the error?
- mpeters13, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Apparently that's just what MAC's like to do in almost any program. Silly MAC's.
Silly Macs or MACS? Media access codes aren't the issue here :p. This is an annoying bug, and there are applications for holding the mouse button in a browser window, like playing games, using some applets, and dragging stuff around in ajax :p. - Skitzo444, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I just tried this and it is definately a problem that needs to be fixed. Open Activity Monitor and watch the CPU usage will you do something in Firefox
- lykedoctor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1wow, firefox takes up about 12% of my resources, it spikes to 100% after only 3 seconds of holding the mouse button down.... dual g5 1.8/2gb ram
- Tedder, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's frustrating when so many people say "just don't click and hold" and so many others say "just don't use Firefox." It's even better when those who keep their laptops tethered to the wall and sitting on a table top far away from a lap say, "this doesn't cause a problem for me."
The 90-some comments on this blog are an example of when it's common to click and hold. For one, when you click and hold the arrows on the bottom of the scroll bars, the CPU% for Firefox pegs. Dragging the scroll bar also causes this behavior, and on a page like this it was very natural to hold through the entire page.
Even a few moments of holding will cause the CPU fan to come on, and that's the real reason why running Firefox on a Powerbook or iBook can have a great impact on the battery. Not to mention that the extra CPU load will cause additional heat.
And switching to Camino or Safari would be fine if Camino or Safari had extensions like Adblock available. Without them, other browsers seem cheap. Additionally, Mozilla/Firefox has made a number of innovations that have forced other browsers to adapt them to stay competitive. Supporting Firefox is good for the web browser market in general.
(additionally, there are a few hundred tab-change extensions; plus you can always use the number keys (e.g. Cntrl+1 on a PC to get 1st tab)) - Whatchamacallit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ok, I duplicated the bug. But I've never noticed it before and I've been running FireFox since it's earliest OS X pre-beta release. As soon as I let go of the mouse button the CPU usage dropped instantly. I don't see this as being a high priority problem. Who is going to hold the mouse button for long periods of time? It takes a few seconds for the CPU to spike and by then most people have already moved on and let go of the button. Eventually it will be fixed but until then it's a low priority glitch that doesn't really impact normal usage. A memory leak would be a more serious problem then a CPU usage spike. I can live with it until Mozilla fixes the bug. No digg for this one....
- effyu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i've been watching this bug since 2003 and am quite suprised at the lack of action on it. i do think it's a real problem, although i've found a workaround for the worst of it.
while it's true that most desktop users might not notice this bug (unless they have a cpu meter installed), for powerbook users it is definitely a problem. when scrolling long pages with the scroll thumb or arrows, it consistently makes the powerbook overheat and the fan come on, and drains the battery. using a scroll wheel helps, but that's not always possible, eg. on an airplane, and you are stuck with the trackpad. and even for non-powerbook users, 100% cpu use for long periods of time will definitely affect the overall performance of your system, especially if you have any other tasks running in the background. someone commented that there's "no slowdown" because it's a "low priority thread", but that is "total BS". it is really and truely 100% cpu use. also, it doesn't take the 4-7 seconds to kick in that other people have mentioned. it is immediate. perhaps your activity monitor is not sensitive enough (try MenuMeters). furthermore, this is not an unavoidable problem of being a carbon app. i have many other carbon apps and none of them behave this way.
luckily there's a solution for the scrolling, which is to use a theme that uses native aqua scroll widgets, for example the "classic" theme. i modified my favourite theme "pinball" to use native widgets and it works great.
the other problem i noticed is with selecting text in an editor window. maybe not such a big problem with firefox, but this happens in mozilla and thunderbird too, when composing e-mail. when you click-drag to select a portion of text, the cpu is so bogged down that sometimes it "misses" what you meant to select. you have to be very deliberate in selecting text. no big deal though, and on recent machines (>500MHz) it's not really noticeable. - kingyubba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1dang. i got it on my PB.... opened up Activity Monitor and sure enough, it takes up all the spare cycles. i hope this gets fixed soon.
- tobtoh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is a feature. If you ever need to get rid of the 'memory' effect on your laptop battery, you can drain the battery first using Firefox! :)
- DJSdotcom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Got a G5 guys, and it happens to me every single time. Try using top to see what I mean.
- kingyubba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1this is quite weird also, because i'm only getting it when holding the button down in the browser window. i see a spike to 10-15% if holding down on the scrollbar, but anywhere else, it pegs... :-(
- DJSdotcom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I just updated the article I wrote about it, but a major cause of this bug can be when you use Google Maps ..... clicking and dragging the map, scrolling the zoom, etc.
- scorpioX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Dual (not dual core) G5, Firefox 1.5, bug reproduced. Although it's not 100%. Both procs were ~ 8% and then jumped up to around 60% until the mouse was let go.
- jessecrouch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2hahah. owned =)
/me points to opera - dissident, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i use opera on my laptop instead. firefox is too resource intensive when opera does the same thing without making the fan on my laptop run every 30 seconds.
- johnrchang, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2No, this is avoidable in Carbon.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/Carbon_Event_Manager/Concept/chapter_2_section_4.html - ciaocibai, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"While we're on the subject of Firefox on OS X, does anyone know a keyboard shortcut to change tabs?"
ctrl-pg (up or down), which on the laptop means ctrl-fn-pg (up or down). i'm sure there is a guide on the mozilla site to all the keyboard shortcuts.
anywho, here's hoping they fix this bug soon. - decompiler, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2from astrosmash, above:
"Total BS.
I'm a longtime Mozilla and Firefox user on Windows and Linux, but I rarely use Firefox on OS X. Firefox has some serious issues on OS X, but this isn't one of them.
This is just an artifact of how older Carbon apps work. Appleworks does the same thing. And the Firefox people are in the process of upgrading their framework to use more modern Cocoa APIs anyway.
Furthermore, there is no slowdown. It's just a low-priorty thread that spins while tracking the mouse. That's just how classic Mac OS did things before OS X. It's not an issue for laptop users or anyone else."
i just confirmed this on my ibook as well, if you open an appleworks 6 document and hold down the mouse button in it, the exact same thing happens: 85-95% cpu usage, w/ no actual slow down. - tsupersonic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Haha, if you think that's the only problem think again. The memory leak on Windows has gotten worse, in just an hour of using Firefox, it was eating 800MB for me. 800MB on my lousy 512MB system. Damn.
- vash, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1click and hold to drag @ #s 1 and 2
- stewacide, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've been using FF 1.5 on OSX all night and didn't notice this. Hope there's a fix soon...
- joejoe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Dragging the scroll bar also causes this behavior, and on a page like this it was very natural to hold through the entire page."
All the more reason why MAC needs to come with a better mouse than the throw-away single button version. Here's an idea, a mouse with a wheel to scroll with. ooooo.. - riancurtis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0change tabs:
CTRL+TAB
i was actually just looking at Firefox Keyboard shortcuts.
I have a NEW powerbook and firefox just does not run that well in OS X. i still will not use anything else...
WHAT ABOUT THE CONSISTENT FIREFOX PROBLEMS WITH YTMND.COM!!
and do not even talk about FTP .... WTF! - TimmyK., on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Just this tried out on my iBook running Tiger, and after about 7 seconds it was hovering around 90-92%. But how long do I actually hold my mouse down for 7 seconds? Not often. After the first 4 seconds or so it was only around 30%, which is still way too high, but not enough to worry me. Of course they should look into fixing this for us battery using folk but if you're running on a desktop I can't inagine this being more than a minor annoyance at the very worst. Unless you sit there holding your mouse button down in Firefox for hours at a time while you are rendering out your new CG animated feature film. Then you will be pissed.
- serpico, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0It was a joke, Flock creates the same high CPU issue. I tried Opera, and it is very low. Safari is low too, but all these current browsers sure take up a lot of memory.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2This just proves that closed source apps like OPERA and SAFARI beat OPEN SOURCE apps every time!
- leanbackvids, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've confirmed with fellow video bloggers that there is another bug with Firefox 1.5 on the Mac. If a page has an embedded Quicktime movie and you try to scroll the page or reposition the window, the movie gets shifted up and the the right. So much for testing.
- kaka, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0geez, you're right... just tested it...
- DRawkus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Heh, I only use Firefox in OSX for online bill pay and banking. Amen.
- manfesto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@effyu - thank you for the clarification (ScribbliesKids uses the native scrollbar, so I didn't notice). However, there doesn't seem to be significant slowdown of performance of Firefox itself or other applications running at the time (though that's probably got nothing to do with Firefox itself but more with preemptive multitasking, at least you're not taking a performance hit - though us laptop users are taking a battery life hit, for sure). Either way, this is a shame - I'd thought OS X support was to be improved in 1.5, seeing as it loaded much snappier, the middle-click event handling was fixed, and the "disappearing flash animation" bug was fixed.
Actually, looking into it, the middle-click bug has also been on bugzilla for three years ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151249 ), but that bug was fixed in the trunk builds over a year ago IIRC. I also remember using a 1.0.2 build that some guy compiled with a kludge (as he called it - though in the short term it did make my life easier, and his patch seemed simple and small enough) to get middle-click events handled properly. Perhaps this bug has also been addressed in the trunk builds? This is at least AS severe as the middle click bug - hopefully somebody somewhere is working on it. If not, then it's just a real shame. - Abatrour, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm running Windows XP on an athlon 1800+ with 256mb of ram and I notice that it also goes 100% for me when there are some flash banners on the screen, it also prevents me from switching tabs when thats happening. Also, is there a way to turn off the thumbnails in the tabs?
- diggnationdevon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Safari is better anyway.
- chriskzoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ah, so this is why my streaming audio cuts out when I'm searching for a bookmarks and holding down the mouse button!
- budGibson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Happens for me on a Powerbook G4 running 10.4
- MikhoohkiM, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0hey this is kinda cool!
- slackerdave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Humm... three thoughts:
1. This is the first thing to max out a CPU on my brand new Quad G5. Just one cpu is maxed though... The rest keep doing their thing.
2. Don't do that. Duh. Even for google maps a sec or two is all you need at a time. I've never noticed an actual usability problem on my pitiful TiBook.
3. Safari works for about 95% of the sites out there. Why are you using Firefox as your primary browser? - dimplemonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0yeah, I've had this problem for quite a while and thought it was just me. I'm glad somone's brought this out into the spotlight. I've taught myself not to do this and am quickly reminded by my fans when I do.
- skyhighrockets, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ummm, No.... it doesn't.
[ Powerbook G4 12" 1.5 Ghz, 768 mb, 80 gb, Superdrive
Firefox RC3 unmodded ] - kinderstod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Just checked Taskman and FF is eating up 130MB of memory on my XP machine. What's worse is that I swear RC2 was holding stable at around 30MB all the time, how in the world could it have gotten worse?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0On my Mac, holding down the mouse button in almost any program causes the CPU to go to 100%! Maybe that's why there's only one mouse button--if there were 2 or 3, they'd need extra CPU to cover the load!
--
Robert
http://www.robert.to/ - wolever, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Re: Switching tabs
I use SwiftTabs and Shift+left,right. Works like a charm. So does apple+1-9. - essrog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Sorry, but "just don't hold down your mouse" is not a solution. By this logic: if I just chose to avoid certain user actions (or functionalities), I guess I would still be using Explorer as the primary browser on my Mac.
And yes, my primary browser is Firefox 1.5 ... for now (?) - cyberdork, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I love the RSS implementation in SAFARI. Firefox's sucks.
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