Firefox 3 hogging 90% CPU, can anything be done about this?

[Alan Cox]

> card.  And I can't imagine the time it would take to come up with a 
> complete drop in replacement for Flash.

Probably a lot less now than before as a lot of the documentation has
finally been published - presumably because Adobe finally realised that
a mostly open microsoft spec versus a totally proprietary Adobe one was a
bad idea ;). I'd rather reimplement Flash than Nvidia drivers - by a
large margin.

> Also, Firefox allows a single bad plugin to make the brower unusable.  
> Maybe it shouldn't do that?  Seems to me there's a legitimate argument 
> to be made there.

FC10 uses the plugger stuff to try and keep them apart (its important for
security too) however the interface plugins used is a very old, rather
inelegant hack from way back when. Easy for firefox to move from it (and
indeed it basically has with the extensions model of its own) but your
proprietary plugins don't move themselves.

> I don't think the "that's proprietary, deal with it" arguments are helpful.

Unfortunately that is reality for a lot of this. There are some things
you can do to isolate misbehaving plugins but there are a lot of things
you can't fix that easily including some of the less nice properties of
the flash plugin.

Increasingly flash isn't needed. The javascript DOM can do a lot in
javascript that used to justify flash. With SVG graphics much of the
animation and gaming is going that way, with Firefox and HTML now going
the theora path the video will become less important too.

Alan