My friend Ian Bell runs Digital Trends, a great site, but lately I’ve been cringing whenever I’ve visited it. Why? Because invariably I see the same thing every time: a Pioneer Flash ad that causes the CPU usage of any computer I’m on to shoot to 100%. It’s not just Digital Trends or Pioneer ads that cause the problem: all sorts of Flash ads cause this problem and it’s only ever in Firefox. It’s been going on for years, yet no one at Firefox or Macromedia/Adobe has ever bothered to fix it. Particularly on my small laptop with it’s single-core 1.2 Ghz CPU, when it’s gunning at 100%, the whole system will grind to a halt. It’s getting so frustrating I’m getting close to switching back to IE7.

UPDATE: I did a bit more testing after updating to Firefox 2.0.0.3 and it seems that there’s only certain frames in the Pioneer Flash animation that’s causing the problems. If you look at the Pioneer ads on this page, you’ll see there’s a part where the rain starts falling in the ad…that’s when my CPU spikes:

This mirrors what I saw with some Pocket PC Techs banners that were running on Pocket PC Thoughts for a while - the designer used a special type of Flash animation to move the snowflakes across the screen, and it caused the CPU spikes as well - falling snowflakes, falling rain…I’m seeing a pattern here.

One of my long-standing frustrations in the realm of geekdom is when I run into software developers who, when faced with a problem with their software, point the finger at another company or application and expect someone else to fix the broken experience for their customer. A year ago this month I ran into a repeat problem with FTP Voyager, a product I had been using for years - I’d upgraded faithfully year after year. In other words, I was a long-time customer of theirs with an investment in their product. Here’s the email I sent (remember this is March 2006):

“I reported a bug a few months ago where FTP Voyager uses up 99% of the CPU and it turned out to be caused by the Windows XP SP2 Firewall being turned on. I just installed FTP Voyager on a brand new PC (my old one died) and did an upload, and again I was smacked with the 99% CPU use bug because I had forgotten to turn off the XP Firewall. I’m surprised this bug hasn’t been fixed yet, because asking your users to deactivate security measures just to be compatible with FTP Voyager seems silly, it not downright irresponsible. When is this bug going to be fixed?”

My basic point was that their product was incompatible with the default configuration of a Windows XP SP2 machine. It seemed pretty cut and dry to me: they needed to fix their product. The response I received from one Louis C. Branch of Rhinosoft had a very different line of thinking:

“I don’t consider the XP firewall to be a security measure. It is not a particularly effective firewall and does not respond to configuration as it should. This is not a bug in FTP Voyager, but a bug in the XP firewall implementation. I recommend using the Kerio or Zone Alarm firewalls if you feel the need to put a software firewall in place on an XP box. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

There are a lot of ways Rhinosoft could have approached this problem - having a user prompt upon install that suggested de-activation of the Firewall, or them actually coding their product to work with the XP Firewall (like every other FTP program seems to be able to do). Instead, they pointed the finger at Microsoft and the XP Firewall and expected the customer to deactivate a security feature of their operating system - sure, it might not be as effective as a dedicated product such as Zone Alarm, but it’s better than nothing. And if I did de-activate it, I’d have to remember to turn it on when connecting to WiFi access points on my laptop every time.

This was the last straw for me (I should have seen the writing on the wall when I had to convince them that multi-threaded upload/download was useful) and I switched to using SmartFTP - a program that, interestingly enough, requires no firewall configuration. Go figure.