my browsers hate my Mac

[cellio]

For the past couple weeks -- but not before then -- both Firefox and Chrome have been randomly seizing up on me on my Mac at home (running Snow Leopard). When this happens, first that application and then (about 10-15 seconds later) the entire machine become unresponsive, presenting the spinning beachball of doom. After a minute or so, but

Comments

[siderea]

I have a similar problem, which I've had for a long time, with my MacBookPro on Snow Leopard. Happens with both Firefox and Chromium, and also Safari. Disabling Flash helped, but didn't fix the problem. [ETA2: And, like in your case, Activity Monitor doesn't report that memory is maxed out

[cellio]

Processor temperature -- interesting. I would not have thought of that, or that I could monitor it, at all!

Thanks for the hint about JS-heavy tabs. I'd noticed that more tabs seemed to degrade performance but didn't make the connection that what's going on in those tabs is the real key. I mean, I usually have a bunch of LJ tabs open, but that's static content -- shouldn't matter, right?

I've been using NoScript on Firefox for years. Granted there are sites I've whitelisted and it's annoying when you hit a site that uses a ton of third-party JS and you have to sort through it, but it's still worth it to me. "Temporarily allow all this page" means "pretend I'm not using this extension in this tab", so in that sense it's not worse than just not using it, I figure. (Modulo a few extra mouse clicks.)

[siderea]

I mean, I usually have a bunch of LJ tabs open, but that's static content -- shouldn't matter, right?

The LJ homepage seems to be a culprit. Regular pages mostly seem fine, but I don't use the new friends feed, so I'm not sure how well that performs.

[cellio]

I meant individual pages -- posts I intend to read/comment on/monitor later. And I don't use the new friends feed either; I hated it when I looked at it and the old one works fine, so I haven't invested any effort in the new one.

Oh, another thing I should have mentioned: I have Firefox set to not load a tab until I actually visit it. (I don't know how to do that in Chrome.) If you're not doing that and you're seeing problems at browser launch, look for that setting in the preferences. I wish I could also tell browsers not to refresh a tab until I go to it; that would presumably help with the JS-heavy-sites problem.