Gecko is getting worse?!

First let me start with a simple statement: I wrote this post from Midori web-browser. If you'd like to guess why, read on.

I didn't want to write this particular post so soon, but I just couldn't hold it any more. In four hours of doing random stuff on computer, gecko managed to anger me to the point I just couldn't go to sleep before writing a rant about it.

First it started with Firefox only, now it's happening to Epiphany, too. Gecko is eating my CPU. I cannot explain why, I cannot tell when, because it's totally random. Just out of the blue, my laptop starts to be dreadfully slow, and until I kill epiphany, it stay such (well, I have never had the patience to wait more than 2 or 3 minutes, so in longer time it might fix itself).

Why ranting about it today? Because it happened twice and both when I was doing my favourite stuff. First I was sketching some echo icons (I'll perhaps write a post about those tomorrow) and suddenly inkscape started to be so slow that it was literally unusable. I wondered what happened to it, and after about 2 minutes I finally fired up system monitor to see if there is anything to see - and there was! Epiphany, which was on the background, on a different virtual desktop, was sucking up CPU. I killed it (I kill epiphany instead of closing it to keep my session saved) and inkscape immediately stared to behave normally.

Next, I was watching some series and in one of interesting scenes the video started playing so slowly that it was pretty quickly out of sync with audio. I went WHOA? My CPU should handle that well. So I paused the playing, got out of the fullscreen view and looked what was happening. Again, CPU was 100% used! While doing nothing! This time I fired up new tab in terminal and killed epiphany. CPU use immediately droped to 0% and I could watch the rest of the episode.

Why I rant about gecko and not epiphany? The reasons are simple - when xulrunner in Fedora was still 1.9b5, this thing happened to firefox. Quite cassualy. But epiphany was fine. BUT. After update to 1.9 final (and waiting for epiphany rebuild, because the mozilla guys again change something so that most xulrunner apps started crashing) epiphany started to suffer from this issue as well. I can only ask: what are you guys at mozilla doing? Preparing for next release? Putting random infinite loops to gecko code, so that you can remove some of them in next release and say it's faster and more efficient? Gah.

Anyway, don't take the last few senteces seriously, it's over too much exagerated what might be the worst case scenairo behaind the curtains ;-)

And why do I not file a bug against it?

• I am lazy


• Someone probably have done it already


• I'd rather spent my time debuging webkit than gecko


• I have better things to do than trying to figure out some random, hard to reproduce bug in gecko


• If I go crazy, I can use epiphany with webkit backend - even though it lacks some features I use, it works

And yeah, you might ask, isn't it a result of me having 50+ opened tabs assorted into 4 windows? My answer would be - old gecko handled it well, webkit handles it even better than that, why gecko 1.9 cannot?

And one random rant for the end: is it just me, or does firefox/gecko does not remember me being logged in here on the blog? It behaves like I am not logged, when I click log in, it quickly discovers I am already logged, but when I go back to my blog homepage it still thinks I am not logged in. WebKit does not suffer this issue, which makes my blog managing easier to do in webkit based browsers...

Update 1: On suggestion from Kevin Kofler, I hereby thank all the people involved in KHTML, WebKit, WebKit gtk port and epiphany for they hard work towards perfect *nix web-browser engine and lightwieght native-gtk web-browser :-) Well, I could also include konqueror folks, but for some reason I don't like it's UI...