Firefox is Pissing Me Off: High CPU Usage When Displaying Flash
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.
Posts
March 20th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
And it’s not just FF for Windows. Both my Macs have the same issue. One has a Core Duo 2.0 and the other a Core Duo 1.8.
March 20th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I haven’t had any CPU usage problems with Firefox and flash. I even just checked that site in Firefox, I hit a max of 31% CPU usage when it was loading and that went down to 8% after that. I’m using firefox 2.0.0.2 and flash 9 on Windows Vista Ultimate with a Core 2 Duo E6400.
March 20th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
idawgik: did you refresh the page a few times? There are probably several banners in rotation and my hunch is the problem is only attached to certain banners. You might be interested in watching your CPU as you surf to a variety of different sites - it might be happening without you knowing.
March 20th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
I’m with idawgik on this one. I hit refresh on that site until I got a Pioneer ad and still virtually no CPU hit.
March 20th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Also, there’s a new FF release today: 2.0.0.3. That might help some of your speed issues.
March 21st, 2007 at 7:07 am
Have you tried Flash Block? Does the trick for me
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/433/
JF
March 21st, 2007 at 7:21 am
Flash block? Nope - I will not block banners ads and deprive Web site owners of the ability to make a living. If you visit a Web site to get the content, accepting the banner ads is part of the deal - the reason why 99.99% of the Web is free and open to everyone is because of the banner ads. You block those, you slowly kill the Web because people like me would vanish.
March 21st, 2007 at 7:27 am
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:
http://news.digitaltrends.com/talkback176.html
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.
March 21st, 2007 at 9:31 am
Sorry guys. I have asked Pioneer repeatedly for new tags, and they are ignoring the request (probably because these ads are working good for them).
The campaign is over April 1st and they will be gone hopefully.