Firefox Consumes the CPU

I had the same problem. Quite a lot of plugin in firefox, not few tabs open. I am browsing in Chinese website with a lot of ad and heavy (not to mention useless) content. Result : CPU 95% just for Firefox. I tried the plugin NOSCRIPT and Firefox jumped back to a reasonnable 0%. Thank you NoScript!!

Thanks Alan, that seems to have done the trick! What a weird thing for FF to do!?

Some users that have an ATI Radeon Card are experiencing this (me as well) with the latest ATI drivers. To remedy this problem download the ATI Radeon OMEGA drivers based on 7.10 (NOT 7.12 AS YOU WILL HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM).

This helped me tremendously and now FF2 and FF3 run fine and speedy with hardly any cpu/ram usage.

Hello,

I am having Sony Vaio laptop (1.6 GHz, 80 GB hard disk and 1 GB RAM). Since 3 months, I am facing major issues. Whenever I start browing (IE or Opera or Firefox) or even when connect external hard disk (to copy data to my laptop), CPU shoots to 100% and stays there making my machine dead slow. Finally I did the following:
1) Did the complete system restore and now laptop is set to factory setting
with no extra software and all 80 GB free. So it is as good as new system
2) also increaded RAM to 1 GB from initial 512 MB
3) have done all performance related task like Defragmentation, Disk Cleanup. I guess since its a fresh system recovery, so no need of doing this.
4) Have Mcafee running on my machine and no virus threat detected.
5) All drivers are up to date

Finally I found something related to my issue on microft support site.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890582/en-us
This was the exact problem what I was facing and I upgraded my windows XP Professional SP2 to latest SP3 patch. STILL THE SAME OLD PROBLEM PERSITS.
Any solution would be really be appreciated.

Thanks Alan - I did what you suggested and it seems to work so far - I have FF V3.0.5 -- Andy :-)

options > security. Untick the 'tell me if the site i am visiting is a suspected forgery'. box.>>>>

- I - today got this problem - I did system restore - and it went away. If you didn't do that on time - sorry - Firefox is a great browser.

P.S. Last thing I did was install Adobe Shockwave Player - I bet that patched me...

- I've just now unchecked the dodgy site warning - and it's even lower (CPU) and stable - thanx.
- And remember - anything wrong - do system restore straight away.

Thanks Alan,

I don't understand why this trick works, but thanks a bunch. I was about to transition everything to internet explorer (which I don't like).

Cheers to you!

Look at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=675175&start=45&st=0&sk=t&sd=a, especially the part about deleting the cookies.txt and/or cookies.sqllite. This helped for me.

Get more ram.