The most recent release of Firefox browser contains a new technology which was supposed to help with the way FlashPlayer, Silverlight and Quicktime runs inside the browser. It’s new and sometimes kinda shaky on Windows, at least. Since so many of my computer ministry friends use Windows, I run XP on my desktop to keep track of such things. (On my laptop, XP eats up the battery far faster than Linux, so it’s CentOS 5 there).
To help me diagnose some of the issues with Windows, I run GKrellM for Windows. Linux and BSD users will recognize this very useful utility which allows you to keep track in real time of CPU and memory use, among other things. I am amazed at the number of applications which default to chugging away in the background on Windows, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t run a CPU monitor which picks up on this stuff.
So I found that Firefox container, once opened in any browser window, or any tab in that active window, will keep the CPU pumping once the media stops playing. Even if you close that tab, it will keep chugging away. You have to manually kill it with Task Manager, or close Firefox. Compare that with the behavior of K-meleon, which knows when the media stops playing, there’s nothing left to do. So the meter on GKrellM goes quiet.
It’s how I found out Nero 7 (bundled with my DVD burner) has this nasty thing called “Scout” which likes to run in the background the same way. Most Windows users have no clue about such things because they don’t use CPU meters, and this is a great way to figure out when something is hogging system resources. Thus, I find K-meleon is far better than Firefox. You might want to get the spellcheck plugin.
I would note if you dig through the K-meleon settings menu, and you find the box which says you want animated graphics to run only once (I hate it when they loop continuously), the checkbox doesn’t work. You’ll have to actually configure it manually. Just open a new window or new tab, click the URL window and blank it out (or hit CTRL-L), then type in about:config. Click the warning button and type in the search bar image. The list of options displayed will be whittled down to very few. Look for the one which says “image.animation_mode” and right-click. Select “modify” and in the box type once. That’s the way you manually set this on all Mozilla-Gecko products, regardless of what OS it is running on. Different settings have different possible options, so you have to research it before you start poking around. This particular issue was widely known among geeks long ago.
K-meleon is the way Firefox was advertised to act way back when it was first proposed. You know, lightweight and simple, not taking too many resources, etc. Yeah. You want K-meleon on Windows.
