As I’m sure you all know, Firefox v1.5 has been officially released and is available for download. Got a G5 processor? Check out this page to download a G5-optimized version of the Fox that is a bit faster. You would think all is gravy in Mozilla-land, but that is definitely not the case.
There is a major bug in Firefox where if you hold down the mouse button to select text, or scroll, or anything inside the browser window, the Firefox CPU usage shoots up to nearly 100% and hogs your entire system until you let go. I just tested it using top and can verify that the CPU usage jumps to between 75-95% depending on the other applications in use at the time. For Powerbook or iBook users this is a major issue, considering your fans will probably turn on and you’ll battery will drain much quicker.
This issue only affects Firefox on Mac OS X, and is unique to the FF application in that other OS X apps like Safari or Mail don’t exhibit this bug. Cocoa applications don’t exhibit this bug, but I’ve learned it’s a problem with the Carbon frameworks that Firefox uses. Other applications that utilize this framework exhibit similar processor hogging. I’m wondering what this bug does to Flock considering there are more things to click on in that interface — this bug might affect Flock more than Firefox because of the user mousing patterns with the updated UI.
I’m not sure why the Bugzilla report isn’t jumped up to high priority considering the major blocking mechanism apparent here, but I hope this is resolved soon. The bug report has now been open for about three years with no one apparently working on a solution.
Update: Think that you won’t be clicking and scrolling much? If you’re using Google Maps, your CPU usage will go to max as soon as you start scrolling the map. I just tried it and top reported my CPU usage sustained at 80-90% throughout the whole time I was using it. Not good at all, especially since so many damn “web 2.0” applications/companies use the Google Maps API to do their stuff.
2nd Update: Front page of Digg!
Thanks to Chris for pointing this out to me in a comment. This is something every Mac OS X user needs to know. Digg this story »
