Monkeyless

I’ve had a weird problem ever since upgrading to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, version 2.0.0.1. The browser’s CPU usage would keep going up the longer that Firefox was running.

So after a day or two of the browser being open, it would be using 20% to 30% of the CPU. I’ve seen that once or twice before with some Flash advertisement that used a lot of CPU, and when I closed the page with the offending ad, the CPU usage dropped back down. But with this issue I could close every tab and just have one blank one open, and the CPU usage would still be high.

I had to close Firefox completely and restart it to get the CPU usage back down. I wound up killing firefox.exe from the Windows task manager once or twice a day rather than close Firefox normally, since if I killed it unexpectedly it would give me the option of restoring my session and getting all my tabs back.

Today I finally broke down and searched around for the answer.

The answer turns out to be ForecastFox, the plug-in that gives you weather information in Firefox.

For whatever reason, there’s an issue with the current versions of ForecastFox (version 0.9.3.1) that’s causing that problem. It makes sense, since ForecastFox is always getting the latest weather information in the background, which means that it has the opportunity to cause memory usage and CPU usage to go up even when you aren’t using Firefox at all.

For now the solution is to disable ForecastFox, since there isn’t a fixed version out yet. Some people recommend the 1-ClickWeather extension as a replacement for ForecastFox. I’ll have to see if I can’t live without the weather at the bottom of the browser, and then look into some alternative like that.

But the short version is, if you’re seeing the same gradual increase in CPU usage over time in Firefox 2.0.0.1 that I was, try disabling ForecastFox.