codeblog code is freedom — patching my itch

March 22, 2006

debugging firefox extensions

Filed under: Web — kees @ 6:15 pm

After installing my amd64 machine and getting my desktop moved, I noticed that Firefox seemed to be running really slowly. Especially google maps. After Brian showed me the Firefox Hacks book, I decided to try and dig into the cause.

By setting the environment variable “NSPR_LOG_MODULES=all:5” you see damn near everything Firefox is doing while it does it. I noticed that it was stalling every time it processed a new cookie (since I don’t let Google set cookies). So I started removing each of my cookie extensions.

To get myself back to a sane state, I just backed up my Firefox profile:

cp -a ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default ~/firefox-profile

Then removed one extension, restarted Firefox, etc, until I found the busted one. Turns out “Extended Cookie Manager” was my problem, so I replaced it with “Cookie Button in the status bar”.

Tedious, but, it worked. And for some reason, getting a list of all the Firefox environment variables proves to be very difficult.

© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

3 Comments

  1. Firefox environment variables? Have you tried about:config?

    Comment by Thomas Taranowski — April 1, 2006 @ 11:45 pm

  2. Yup; didn’t immediately see a way to selectively disable extensions, though.

    Comment by kees — April 1, 2006 @ 11:54 pm

  3. You can disable and enable extensions by right-clicking them in the extension manager window. This works in Firefox 1.5.0.6 (don’t know about earlier versions though).

    Comment by Onno Zweers — September 3, 2006 @ 10:46 am

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