Skype Extension For Firefox Is A Piece Of Crap – Leaks Memory, Hangs Firefox, Clubs Baby Seals

Artem Russakovskii — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:31:06 +0000

Introduction

Dear Skype,

you are great. You have the convenience of a nearby, well, convenience store and the UI that is acceptable to even an Apple fanboy (I'm not one, I'm just saying).

Skype also has a Firefox extension which finds all pieces of text that resemble phone numbers on web pages you are visiting and converts them into clickable Skype buttons . One click and you're dialing the number. The premise is great but the execution… When it comes to your Firefox extension, Skype – you suck. You really suck.

The Problem Bullshit

So what makes me say these mean things? Is it the fact that when simply searching Google for "skype firefox", one finds mostly blog posts and references to major fail? Or is it the fact that MozillaZine's Problematic Extensions page lists Skype as one of the buggiest?

Well, yes. Those are great, aren't they? However, what really prompted me to write this post is my own experience with this extension.

As I am getting into Android development nowadays, I read the Android dev guide quite a lot. Thus, it was no surprise that yesterday I was happily reading the page about Handling UI Events. What was a surprise, however, is that when I clicked over to the View API reference page (in case that page ever changes for documentation reasons, I also saved it here), my Firefox went into a painful agony and exploded in a few minutes.

What the fudgemonkeys? Let's do this again and watch the Process Explorer.

This is what we call a memory leak – a prime example at that. In the screenshot above, the CPU usage spikes to 100% (shown as 50% because it's a dual core CPU), Firefox's memory usage jumps to around 2GB from 100MB, in 500MB/s increments. Finally, at 5GB total system memory consumption, either the OS kicks in or some major swapping starts to occur – I'm not sure which of the two is happening exactly but you can see it when the green CPU marker gets overtaken by the red one.

As I have a large number of extensions installed, I was dreading the next step: disabling them until the culprit was found. Ugh…

Sure enough, after about half an hour of starting Firefox, observing the memory leak, killing, and restarting it, I narrowed it down to the Skype extension. Somebody at Skype needs to fess up. And here's the kicker – it only exposes the memory leak in the following configuration:

If you turn number highlighting on – it's fine. If you turn name highlighting off – it's fine. But if you turn number highlighting off but leave name highlighting on – major fail.

The Conclusion

So where am I going with all this? Here is the summary:

somebody at Skype doesn't know how to program
this is the worst memory leak in a Firefox extension I've ever seen
this extension is notorious for its crashes, bugs, and memory leaks
keep using this extension if you're
- a masochist
- need to perform burn-in tests for your CPU or RAM

Have you had problems with the Skype extension? If so, share in the comments.

Firefox Being Slow, Especially Switching Tabs, High CPU Load, Memory Problems? Are You Using Firecookie For Firebug?

Artem Russakovskii — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:00:00 +0000

The Problem

I use a lot of extensions. A LOT. They slow down my Firefox while giving something useful in return. Most of them are harmless and do not affect the speed too much but there are select few that are just CPU, memory, and performance hogs.

Until Firefox gets an extension manager that can show what the impact from each extension on time/CPU/memory is, one can resort to guessing, disabling, testing, and looking for clues to find these conniving little bastards.

Anyway, so where was I? Recently, my Firefox became increasingly unresponsive, especially when switching tabs. After some time, it was a pain to switch tabs altogether, so I had to resort to restarting the browser, only to find the same problem coming back again and again. Today, I finally got a clue – a bunch of such messages came on mentioning this unresponsive sript and prompting me to stop it:

chrome://firecookie/content/fireCookie.js:2881

chrome://firecookie/content/fireCookie.js:3156

chrome://firecookie/content/fireCookie.js:3794

Firecookie (0.8 at the time of this writing). Arrr!

Quickly, I googled the problem and sure enough – other people are suffering from the same problem.

Firecookie adds support for managing cookies directly from within Firebug and is quite handy. However, not handy enough to kill my browser on a daily basis, even with cookie handling turned off within Firebug itself.

The Result

I am pleased to report that after uninstalling Firecookie, my Firefox is noticeably faster switching tabs, does not hang, and does not use as much CPU. I do not know what the developer of Firecookie is going to do about it as he does not seem to be able to reproduce the issue. Until then, goodbye frustration and hello… whatever other extensions handle cookies.