FireFox makes me BeachBall

[Samuriajackon]

The mac I have listed below does the spinning beachball thing ALOT when I'm using Mozilla's FireFox browser. IT's gotten to the point some times where I have to hard shut down the machine by holding the power switched. I have the following installed with firefox as addons....
Office Live Plug-in 7.6.3(Microsoft)
Shockwave flash 10.0.32
Jave Embedding Plugin 0.9.7.2 MRJ Plugin ver. 1.0-jep-0/.9.7.2
Quicktime 7.6.3 plugin
Flip4Mac 2.2.3
Default GECKO plugin(No idea what this is)

I also have something for a facebook plug in but it's not listed and I don't remember what it did. I just removed the Mini-istat widget...maybe that was the problem, not sure. I just uninstalled Firefox with App Cleaner and reinstalled using somehting i freshly downloaded. I ran all the Tech Tool delux stuff that came with the MacBook Pro Apple Care CD set. I also play COD4 and World of Warcraft, without problem. iTunes Illustrator CS3 and MS Office run fine....

Any thoughts?

 

[angemon89]

Back when I would use Firefox I had similar problems. It was usually an add-on that was causing the slowdown and the use of 99% of my CPU. So what I did is I uninstalled all the add-ons to make sure that the browser ran fine. Then I would install one add-on at a time and narrow it down until I would fine the bad one.

I wouldn't worry about running applications like Tech Tools. The problem here IS Firefox, not your computer.

 

[KF1]

I also notice quite often, that while using FF, it takes sometimes quite reasonable activity of the CPU (have a look in the activity monitor).
FF2.x was quite worse regarding memory usage, but I have the beachball also w/ FF3.5 often. Thought I remember that especially websites using Flash respectively how FF handles Flash leads to stressing the fan resp. displaying the beach ball (however, also w/ Safari I have seen this).
btw: I am running FF also w/ a couple of plugins (30ish installed, 20ish are activated).

Instead of hard-resetting your machine, you should be good w/ quitting the FF process via the menu of Mac OS X (Apple logo).

>Default GECKO plugin(No idea what this is)
That belongs to FF itself and is the rendering engine for the websites, if I a am right.

The other main thought is: you are running it on a MacBook, me too.
I think the slower/weaker GFX is also a reason why you see the beachball definitely more often than it would be on a MBP w/ a proper GFX hardware.

 

[Samuriajackon]

I also notice quite often, that while using FF, it takes sometimes quite reasonable activity of the CPU (have a look in the activity monitor).
FF2.x was quite worse regarding memory usage, but I have the beachball also w/ FF3.5 often. Thought I remember that especially websites using Flash respectively how FF handles Flash leads to stressing the fan resp. displaying the beach ball (however, also w/ Safari I have seen this).
btw: I am running FF also w/ a couple of plugins (30ish installed, 20ish are activated).

Instead of hard-resetting your machine, you should be good w/ quitting the FF process via the menu of Mac OS X (Apple logo).

>Default GECKO plugin(No idea what this is)
That belongs to FF itself and is the rendering engine for the websites, if I a am right.

The other main thought is: you are running it on a MacBook, me too.
I think the slower/weaker GFX is also a reason why you see the beachball definitely more often than it would be on a MBP w/ a proper GFX hardware.

Now Spotlight is indexing...and has been for almost 2 hours...what's up?