Fortunately I don’t have any of those major ones, I was hoping it might actually be able to check what add-ons you have installed and list them if they have any significant impact. More likely they probably don’t have a large database.
That may come at some point. I think Mozilla is trying to get add-on devs to tighten up their programs as Firefox is ultimately getting the blame for the slowness.
Yes, they are cracking down on the add-on developers to clean-up there code to improve loading.
It is certainly needed, mind you people are their own worst enemies in this area too, some have more add-ons than you can shake a stick at, me I only have 28 ;D
But I do have a few that aren’t compatible with FF4 yet ;D
There are some “well known” in the list…
Mozilla has the fame of having a slow startup. They’re doing well pushing the developers toward a most exigent situation.
I only have one add-on on the list. Download Helper, however It doesn’t seem to impede my internet hopping all that much while it is in progress. The first thing I do before I use it is clear my cache. That helps.
I think that most of the slowing is about the initial firefox startup as it loads these add-ons. Personally I don’t see any issue on browsing with those that I have installed and if anything the security and blocking add-ons I have, NoScript, AdBlock Plus and RequestPolicy could help speed browsing due the the cr*p they stop loading or scripts being run, etc.
It will always be a compromise on what you load, the whole point of the add-ons is the way it should help the way that you browse and the additional security that you want. The same as running an AV to protect your system there will always be a performance hit, choosing the right AV (avast of course) limits that hit.
Read the comments on the link Simon gave in the first post (not a blog) and they actually mention browsing.
Add-ons provide many useful features and functions, but they can also cause Firefox to become slower. [b]Some add-ons can even slow Firefox to a crawl and make it difficult to use for regular web browsing.[/b]
So by implication some might also have an impact on browsing, though untested.
However, that list does only relate to startup times.
The following add-ons have the most impact on how long it takes Firefox to start up.
Eh. That list is irrelevant for anything but startup. For one, ABP being about #12 on the slow chart, saves me a couple of seconds every time I visit a page infected with those obnoxious tracking/counting bugs, let alone the Facebook/Twitter/Google Analytics junk (covered by stuff like Disconnect/Ghostery). Compared to that, I leave browser running for days.
I also, believe the subject is referring to both start up and browsing speeds, as DavidR. Perhaps the list only shows start-up slow down as it is a more measureable statistic for all users. How much an add-on slows down browsing would be somewhat dependent on a user’s connection speed.
As the test results for Adblock Plus with EasyList (here tested with all the caching introduced in Adblock Plus 1.3.5) indicate, we have bigger worries than whether Adblock Plus is installed packed or unpacked. Having a filter lists adds 250 ms to the startup time for me. Out of these, [b]200 ms are spent by Gecko parsing the element hiding stylesheet — not something I can really influence[/b]. The only way is having EasyList reduce the number of filters somehow (currently it has 11 thousands).
yeah just as an example: Xmarks and FlashGot are in the top list, and I’m not gonna blame the extension devs for - according to Mozilla - not writing their code properly. I’ll blame Firefox extension system code in the first place. I’m no dev, but the issue is definitely a Firefox issue. Other browsers use extensions and don’t have the startup issues that FF always had.
So in the meantime, I’ll keep using the extensions that I need… at least for the few times I still use Firefox. Rest of the time, Chrome does a good job thanks ;D
Personally I have never been that bothered by the loading/startup time of firefox as I only start it once a day. When I first got it a long time ago and before I started collecting add-ons to make my browsing safer/better and to help in the way I use the browser, my startup time was around 8 seconds.
A lot of water has crossed under the bridge since FF 1.5 I think it was when I started using it as my default browser. Now we have FF4 and I have approaching 30 add-ons and my startup time is of the order of 12 seconds and that is with usually four tabs being opened from my previous session.
So what would/could I do if I managed to get back those 4 seconds or perhaps a little more time, not a lot. We have all become very impatient in the internet age and fast broadband if something doesn’t happen instantly we want to know why or more likely we are annoyed.
Well spoken, Dave…!!
When the times get measured in milliseconds, thats all quite useless.
Even, if FF would take 10 secs to start (which it doesn’t, btw), I would use it…!!
I prefer flexibility/adjustability over pure speed.