Sluggish Firefox

One of the best things about Firefox in my opinion is all the different “extensions” you can install into it to add additional functionality. However, over the past month or so I’ve been experiencing a very frustrating time using Firefox – the whole program seemed to be running on a general go-slow.

I’d have problems with just simple things like typing something and then waiting a few seconds for it to catch up with me. Add into that, regular freezing and very slow scrolling through my tabs, it’s really been annoying the hell out of me.

I’d reduced some of the large number of extensions I had installed, but to no avail. I’d been looking at potential background processes which could be sucking up resources and choosing to un-install some, however this didn’t resolve matters neither.

I then thought back to a similar experience I had about 3 months ago when I was using Google Desktop – which I thought was a great little application – yet I eventually realised it wasn’t so little as it was slowing my whole PC, which was a shame, since it was very useful, however it had to go!

It then occurred to me that I had installed Google Toolbar extension in the last month or so, I had kept it during my previous extension clean-up because I found the Pagerank indicator among other things useful. I therefore tried uninstalling that extension, re-started Firefox and said outloud ‘WOW!’ The difference was amazing!

Ordinarily, I’m a huge Google advocate and am always recommending their services to people, however I am now wondering if some of their offline software installs are not as efficient as their online services? I also use Google Earth and Picasa, both of which run perfectly well, so some local installed programs would appear to be OK.

Has anyone else had these problems using these Google Desktop and Toolbar?

Related Pages:

1. How To Improve Firefox Performance
2. Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Preview
3. Firefox 3.6 Update Released – New Persona Themes & Faster!
4. Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 Released…Without Windows 7 Aero Peek?
5. Google Chrome TV Advert

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