"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

Back on Novemer 17, 2007, in this blog I recommended that you try a Firefox add-on called PicLens.  Initially I thought it was one of the better extensions with a new innovative way of looking at pictures on web sites. I have to retract that recommendation and go so far as to suggest you remove it.

Although this is a personal use opinion, other than one other user that helped with my own personal tests, if you care to read the comments and discussions on the Mozilla addon site itself, you will see much agreement with my findings of excessive processor use and computer crashes.

I have been using Cooliris and PicLens for some time and thought they were terrific addons to Firefox, second to none.

However, since the update to PicLens 1.6.1.1029 I have had nothing but problems, to the point where I uninstalled it permanently.

Using a Toshiba Satellite Laptop, running Windows Vista Home Premium, using the Firefox browser v2.0.0.12, the following resulted:

* On Facebook (and at times on other sites), after viewing pictures for a short time, anywhere from a minute to several minutes using both the picture wall or the full PicLens pictures, the plugin will lock up. If you click on the 'X' to close it, the computer goes to a black screen. Then hitting Esc to exit, results in a box saying the program has to close, and it shuts down Firefox completely.

* Whether PicLens is actually in use or not, page loading in Firefox is slowed down considerably. Disabling PicLens returns Firefox speed to normal.

After running some usage tests on PicLens and sites such as Facebook over a period of a couple hours on computers with XP as the operating system, some unusual results were confirmed.

* PicLens did not lock up as it did using Vista.

* On a dual core processor machine, cpu usage stayed at a low of 54%, peaking to 100% constantly. Disabling the PicLens addon reduced the cpu usage to 4%, with occasional 11% peaks as other programs were used.

* Anytime PicLens was re-enabled, constant cpu usage jumped to the same 54% minimum, peaking often to 100%, with no other programs in use other than Firefox.

* If other programs were used, such as Messenger, they would hesitate during the 100% usage peaks.

* Of course if Firefox was shut down, effectively turning off PicLens, then cpu usage went to the 4% range.

* On two XP machines, having PicLens installed, slowed down the loading of web pages considerably, even when not actually using PicLens, which indicated it must be doing something in the background.

The Firefox slow down was duplicated on another Vista computer at another residence far from the several I ran my tests on, using a different internet provider.

It appears that these events occurred when the slide wall feature was added. Because of the abnormal cpu load on XP, the crashes or lockups in Vista and the slow down of Firefox on both,  I have elected not to use this extension and to remove it entirely.

I have tested this thoroughly over the past few months and the problem repeats consistently.  I bring this to your attention, because of my previous recommendation, so that if you are experiencing slow downs, lockups, or crashes with Firefox, it may be an extensions doing.

I did report this concern to the CoolIris team and they responded by requesting a text dump of my computer's DxDiag. Since this involved several computers, along with numerous experiences of the same problem on Mozilla's site by other users, I elected not to do that.

-=One Day At A Time=-

This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License