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Do all these extensions slow down firefox?

By jaan - April 16th 2008 at 02:22 AM

I keep seeing interesting firefox extensions all over the place and have ended up downloading a whole lot of them (which, btw, I never use!).

Over the last few months my firefox performance has really deteriorated. I know there are some memory leak issues on Firefox, but I wanted to make sure that the extensions aren't slowing down my performance.

Do the extensions slow down performance? If so, what is the max. number of extensions I should add?


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  1. By an anonymous user on April 16th 2008 at 07:18 PM

    It all depends on the extensions in play. SEO Quake, for example, will gather information from multiple sources at page load and that will have some bearing on your performance. A del.icio.us extension on the other hand is "passive" and only initiates a transaction when invoked and will not be a factor in performance.


    I, for one, use over 15 extensions and never seem to have an issue. Its still faster than IE with ZERO extensions! :)


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  2. By an anonymous user on April 16th 2008 at 10:30 PM

    I also use over 15 extensions and never have a problem. If you run an extreme number of extensions, you can slow things down some, but this guy ran 100 simultaneously with only some speed loss:


    http://cybernetnews.com/2006/02/26/the-ultimate-firefox-test-installing-...


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  3. By an anonymous user on April 18th 2008 at 01:10 AM

    It really depends on what those extensions are. Some extensions send and receive information from parent sites and this really slows things down. For example, the Alexa plugin is great - it shows you information for each site. But, it requires a round-trip to the Alexa service for each site, so that definitely slows things down.


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  4. By normchow on April 18th 2008 at 04:26 AM

    I uninstalled all my plug-ins and life (and productivity) is a LOT better :)


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  5. By abhinavbakshi@odesk.com on April 22nd 2008 at 07:48 PM

    Well, Yes! Sometimes it really makes your system or browser slow when you have so many extensions/plugins running at the same time.

    So, its better to uninstall or you can disable the non-usable extensions for the time being & enjoy/use the right ones.


    Ciao

    Abhinav Bakshi


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  6. By delia on April 23rd 2008 at 08:52 AM

    I haven't noticed a major difference in performance with the extensions I use but sometimes an extension will crash Firefox. As a web developer I can't live without them though and take the bad with the good.


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  7. By an anonymous user on June 18th 2008 at 01:31 PM

    Its not the extensions, its the memory that firefox soaks up but I think that should be solved in 3.0


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