Having the Hummer handle my RSS feed [LWN.net]

Having the Hummer handle my RSS feed

Posted Jun 13, 2013 7:43 UTC (Thu) by tpo (subscriber, #25713)
Parent article: RSS feed reading in Firefox

Sometimes I wonder how many nuclear plants the world could do without if Firefox (and Thunderbird) would just shut up and keep quiet when no is using them (such as tabs that are in the background, Firefox being minimized etc.).

Firefox is by a large, large margin the #1 power consuming program on my laptop: looking at this page here, where absolutely nothing is moving is using 6.5% of the CPU. Often enough Firefox (or probably rather flash) is using 98% of the CPU doing nothing evidently useful.

I've even got a shell shortcut pair `ffs` and `ffw` to kill -STOP/CONT everything firefox/thunderbird: https://github.com/tpo/little_shell_scripts/blob/master/f...

Therefore, having yet more functionality sucked into a tool that makes my laptop fume and heat my thighs is not really something I'd be looking forward to.

apt-get install liferea

makes me happier.
*t

to post comments

Having the Hummer handle my RSS feed

Posted Jun 13, 2013 7:55 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (5 responses)

I'm guessing you've got some extensions installed... Here, Firefox in the background takes 0.0% CPU. But then, the only extension I've got is an ad blocker. Thunderbird on the other hand seems to take a whopping 0.7% of CPU, when downloading mail, otherwise none, while my RSS reader of choice, Akregator, when not downloading stuff, again uses no CPU at all.

Having the Hummer handle my RSS feed

Posted Jun 13, 2013 8:03 UTC (Thu) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link] (4 responses)

> I'm guessing you've got some extensions installed

Yes I do:

* Adblock Plus
* Certificate Monster
* Cookie Monster
* EventBug
* Firebog
* Go Parent
* JSONView
* Konquefox
* NoScript
* RefControl
* RequestPolicy

I also have 61 Tabs open.

Thunderbird has Lightning (having a calendar is the reason I'm using it in the first place).

Having the Hummer handle my RSS feed

Posted Jun 13, 2013 10:36 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] (1 responses)

Try adding BarTab, which some people are still maintaining to some extent. One of its features is the option to unload background tabs after a period of idleness. I have my period set to 7 days, but you could set yours to 1 hour and probably see improvement from that.

BarTab

Posted Jun 14, 2013 2:28 UTC (Fri) by idupree (guest, #71169) [Link]

Currently, "UnloadTab" is the best currently-working BarTab replacement I've found.

Having the Hummer handle my RSS feed

Posted Jun 20, 2013 11:34 UTC (Thu) by flammon (guest, #807) [Link] (1 responses)

Firebug will set fire to your CPU. Unfortunately I can't live without it so I must endure the heat for now.

Having the Hummer handle my RSS feed

Posted Jun 20, 2013 18:07 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link]

On the plus side, in recent versions (of either Firefox or Firebug or both, I'm not sure), you can enable/disable the firebug extension without needing to restart the browser.