Iately Fire­fox has taken upwards of 1 minute to start and almost as long to restart. Open­ing a new win­dow or even load­ing lots of tabs was slow as well. I unin­stalled sev­eral plu­g­ins and exten­sions that I thought might be try­ing to do auto­matic updates at startup and caus­ing the delay. After doing that, startup is back to a few sec­onds. Today I did some research on one that I had a hunch about, the Ubiq­uity exten­sion from Mozilla Labs. It turns out that ver­sion .1.2 has a ter­ri­ble per­for­mance bug. Nor­mally Fire­fox does 1 write to a par­tic­u­lar sqlite data­base file, but with Ubiq­uity it did hun­dreds or thousands.

There is a new test ver­sion out that fixes the prob­lem but I am not going to rein­stall Ubiq­uity. I just haven't found enough use for it so far, though it looks cool over­all. I am really glad to have Fire­fox back to nor­mal as well!