Posted by Vince on 10/13/2009, 1:53 am, in reply to "Snow Leopard bug"
68.144.14.16
of Firefox.
I've had this problem now for MONTHS with Firefox....
A certain website -seemingly possessed by some kind of evil spirit- would instantly hog 100% of my CPU (on my old 1 ghz Pentium 3 computer) the moment I opened that site on my screen. If I minimized the window, the CPU usage would instantly drop to normal. I fairly quickly came to realize that it was related to an animated .gif being used on the site for a background image but I could NOT find out WHY this was occurring. Eventually I discovered that turning OFF animations in Firefox would solve the problem but ....... that is only sheer avoidance and not any kind of solution.
The weird thing is that this problem only occurred significantly in FireFox and not in IE or Netscape. Suggested solutions on the internet called for re-installing Firefox but I tried that and it didn't work. Firefox acted exactly the same way on this machine after a total purge and reinstall and ......... on a second OS which runs on a completely different hard drive as well. Thus, I knew that it WASN'T a corrupted drive or registry; it was Firefox itself.
And then one day I discovered the cause .... quite by accident.
Firefox SCALES the page according to a user's desire. Hitting Cntrl+ makes the page bigger; hitting Cntrl- makes the page smaller. Ok, Netscape does the same but it ONLY scales the text and not graphics. Firefox actually makes images larger and smaller as well. And therein lay the problem. When I scaled the page down and down, there was ONE particular setting when the CPU usage would suddenly plummet to normal. Otherwise, larger or smaller than that ... the CPU usage would rocket right up to 100% again.
Finally I knew what it was: it was a clocking problem with the graphics card. There were cycle collisions. (This is something similar to the old Beverly Hillbillies shows, where the old Model T's spoke wheels always appeared to be rolling backwards. If the camera shuttering speeds had followed the speed of the wheels, they would have consistently turned the right way but ...... with a fixed shutter speed, the wheels would appear to go forward, stand still, go backwards, disappear and then go forward again etc. ... as the vehicle increased speed).
My graphics card -while being a relatively "high end" ... is ATI and ATI makes crappy video cards that cause all sorts of problems. (Side note: since AMD bought out ATI, AMD type motherboards automatically come with ATI cards ........ something to watch for when buying a new brand name computer like ACER. Expect display problems if you have an ATI graphics renderer.)
Although my computer is NOT brand name, I made the mistake of buying an ATI graphics card and I DO have some crazy problems with it. One of these days, Alice -bam -- to the moon .... with this card! Until then, it's "suffer baby".
Oh and ..... I was going to say .......
Could it be possible that Apple's new OS-X version is clashing with video cards, causing the problem?
-Vince
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