MacNewsBlog

Here's a helpful tip for all of you who use FireFox as your main browser. We're not sure if there is a similar trick in Safari but there may be. If you know please drop us a line!

I run MenuMeters on my MacBook Pro so I can keep tabs of my system at all times. I also do a ton of work in my web browser of choice, FireFox, which means I usually have multiple tabs opened at once. One day I saw my CPU usage was going crazy and I decide to see what the deal was. Turns out it was FireFox that was hogging up all the CPU time.

At first I couldn't figure out how a simple webpage could be using up all that power but then it dawned on me that many of these pages had Flash advertisements on them that were constantly cycling through their animations. Quitting FireFox successfully calmed the CPU down to flat line which proved that it was indeed the Flash sites causing the excessive CPU usage.

I went hunting for a plug-in to kill Flash ads in FireFox and found a really great one called FlashBlock. Description from their website:
"Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content."

After installing this plugin I very rarely see CPU usage spike because of multiple tabs opened in FireFox. In additon, I can still view flash media when I want to by clicking on the placeholder. This plug-in is a must have if you do any type of surfing in FireFox and notice CPU usage getting hogged up.