First off, all my cards on the table. I’ve read the first few books of the Potter series, I think it was the first 4. They were okay, but I usually don’t enjoy reading about the tortured love lives of teenagers so I didn’t make it to book 5 or beyond. I’ve seen all the movies. My wife loves the books and the movies, so I know what happens in each book, and I knew what was going to happen in this film.
There are spoilers in this review. You have been warned.
So, I used procmon to see what Firefox was doing when it was taking 60 seconds to start up, and it was reading a lot of files from a lot of different locations. The one that caught my eye was C:\Documents and Settings\me\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files, and a quick check revealed I had over 7000 files in there. Not from Firefox, but from programmes which use the IE engine to display web pages and html content (like, XFire). I removed them all, and the startup times for Firefox dropped to about 15-20 seconds.
Then a friend sent me this link from LifeHacker.
So, not only do I now know what is causing the slowdown, I know why, and I know it’s classed as a bug.
Firefox is still slow, it wasn’t (just) Adblock plus. I’ve even tried with a totally clean profile and it can still take 60 seconds to launch. If Firefox was the last thing I shut down (say last thing at night) then it opens instantly even if it’s 12 hours later (like first thing in the morning). However, if anything else (reasonably significant) is run in-between then it takes an age.
Investigation continues.
Firefox had been getting slower and slower to start up. It was getting stupid, 30 seconds, 50 seconds, longer. If I started Firefox (and made a cup of tea while it was launching), closed it and restarted it, it would only take a few moments, maybe 5-10 seconds. I turned off Firefox’s check for updates option, maybe it was causing issues, but to no avail.
It was really frustrating. A search of the web turned up a million posts about Firefox startup being slow but nothing really useful. One suggestion to turn off session restores, but I was sure this wasn’t an issue with disk writes, it didn’t seem to be doing anything in the seconds it was taking to start, no churning, not much CPU.
I check my add-ons, and I was only running four. British dictionary, Xmarks, Web Developer and Adblock Plus. At which point I had some kind of epiphany, and disabled Adblock plus. Then I went to bed. No point in just starting Firefox straight away, it was always pretty quick until some period of time had passed, so I figured being asleep should lull it back into a slow start.
Double clicked the icon this morning and 0.5 seconds before I could start browsing.
I’m pretty sure FF3 was slow and not just FF3.5, but maybe it’s worse with Adblock plus and FF3.5. Maybe I was doing something wrong with Adblock plus in Firefox, who knows. All I know is that without ABP it now takes under a second to launch Firefox and with it, over 50.
I’m just pleased it’s all working again and I’ll pay the price by manually ignoring adverts (and just hope Firefox avoids issues when adverts from Evil Sources [tm] attempt to install malware by just viewing the ad).
Finally got around to getting the pictures off the camera, the flowers have exploded over the last two days even more so than when these were taken.
Something about the moon looked really beautiful tonight. I tried to take some shots but this is exactly the kind of thing the low price camera ranges don’t deal with very well. They either ended up too saturated or too dark and I couldn’t get a sharp shot.
This is our lawn this morning. Yesterday was red hot, then it rained overnight at some stage, and the snails came out in force. This is a tiny selection of the army that was covering our lawn. Sometimes if we go to the car at night it sounds like we’re walking on eggshells.
Transformers delivers an engaging movie experience with thrills, spills and robot explosions, no more than you would expect but it hits the spot if that’s what you wanted.
Salvation manages to pull the franchise out of the gutter with a good-enough performance supported mostly by the action and special effects.
This remake of the original classic goes through the motions but appears to have no soul, and if you can’t attach yourself to the female lead and her annoying kid you’re left wondering why you should care.