Speeding Up Your Browser

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This is immense:

I need to be clear here: If you have Firebug installed you are probably not getting fast Javascript. Firebug doesn’t have to be active on your current page. If you have the grey icon on your status bar, you have probably disabled the JIT. This is true if you have ever enabled the Console and consequently the Script panels and left them on. This is likely true for most recent versions of Firebug. The quick fix is to disable the Script and Console panels via the mini menu on their respective tabs.

We need to shout about this more loudly!

I just followed those instructions, and my browser suddenly got a whole lot snappier. And I bet there are loads of web developers out there who think “I love developing with Firefox, but when I browse with it, it’s really slow…” These are core opinion formers, and their experience is sucking unncessarily. I’m glad that blog post says there’s now a fix :-)

9 thoughts on “Speeding Up Your Browser”

  1. I would hope that “loads of web developers” use Firefox profiles, with (at least) one profile for their usual browsing, maybe heavily customized and protected by NoScript, AdBlock(Plus), CookieYouNameYourExtension, and one profile for development, with firebug, console debugging, etc. In most other areas you would not expect a debugging/development environment (say, libs with debug symbols) to perform like the end-user environment either, would you?

  2. I’m a web developer. Unlike Michael J Gruber, I dont screw around with profiles unless absolutely necessary for debugging.

    This MUST be fixed in that I should be able to have Firebug running but dormant and get the benefits of Tracemonkey.

    GRRRRRRRRR

    Why does Mozilla keep doing things that make me dislike Firefox? I am now at the point where my six year love affair with Firefox is getting very rocky. I’d consider an alternative if there was one. In other words I’m now in the position I was with IE6 at the turn of the century: I dislike the browser I am using but see no better alternative.

    Please give me some love back Foxy, starting with fixing this crazy bug. After all, FireBUG should benefit from Tracemonkey as much as anything, not block Tracemonkey altogether.

  3. pd: Whoa, chill. TraceMonkey only even existed in 3.5, and this bug is fixed in 3.6. If you’ve been using Firebug this whole time, then you haven’t actually lost anything.

  4. Michael: it depends on your mental model of the situation. If I have a debugger installed on my hard disk, I don’t expect it to slow down my programs until I actually run them under it. Similarly, I could think “I have Firebug installed, but it’s not going to slow things down until I enable it for a page.” I can certainly understand people having that view.

    pb: A bit harsh, surely? Firefox “made you dislike it” because we didn’t deliver performance improvements to you that we delivered to most other people? Are you jealous of them?

  5. Unfortunately I think there is some confusion here.

    Disabling the Script, Console, or Net panels will improve performance of Firebug in all versions and for all pages. That is exactly the reason we introduced the ability to enable/disable these panels.

    As far as I know, there is no way to enable the JIT on Firefox 3.5 with Firebug installed. As soon as Firebug initializes it turns on Firefox’s ‘jsd’; as soon as ‘jsd’ is on, JIT is off.

    In Firebug 1.5b7 or newer with Firefox 3.6b6 or newer, Firebug suspend will allow the JIT to be on. In addition, Firebug will not turn ‘jsd’ on unless you have Firebug enabled on some page. So once the new versions are available, the JIT should run when ever the Firebug status bar icon is gray.

  6. John: are you saying that in Firefox 3.5, the Firebug extension needs to be entirely disabled in the Addons manager in order to use the JIT?

  7. John: are you saying that in Firefox 3.5, the Firebug extension needs to be entirely disabled in the Addons manager in order to use the JIT?

  9. The same is true for venkman – as SeaMonkey installs that by default, this has been in our focus of blockers for a while and we are heavily working on a way to make it possible to have it installed and not slowing down JavaScript – but unfortunately that’s not easy as we run into problems in very core code like component manager… :(

    See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483282 and its dependencies for some fun around this.

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