Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

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 …

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 …