For a while now, Iceweasel/Firefox comes with built-in phishing protection, which is undoubtedly a good thing given the number of idiots using the Web these days.
But the implementation is crap. If you surf to a phishing site, such as this test site, the page loads as you would expect and then the first strange things happen:
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the mouse movement becomes sluggish as the browser increases its virtual memory needs from 466Mb to a measely 912Mb, while the RSS jumps from 134Mb to 423Mb. The entire computer hangs for 2-3 seconds whenever I drag the mouse pointer off the window. I am not saying that my window manager (fluxbox) or Xorg or anything else on this machine is flawless, but this problem only ever appears with Iceweasel/Firefox. Anyway, it’s impossible to follow any links on the page, the mouse pointer does not even change.
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suddenly, an icon and a little triangle appear at the right side of the URL bar.
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about 7 seconds later, the rest of the balloon appears, alerting me to the dangers of phishing attacks. Did people think those things are so extraordinarily beautiful that they had to be copied from Windows (or Apple, or whatever)?
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another 5 seconds later, the webpage darkens.
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with an entirely unresponsive browser, I have no other choice but to try to leave the page, which is easier said than done: Hitting Ctrl-W to close the tab does not have any effect… for almost 25 seconds; then the page was finally gone and the system restored itself to normal.
I get similar performance problems on the StaTravel website, and on map.search.ch, it almost always crashes.
Thank you, Firefox developers, for bringing the joys of the Windows world to Linux!
NP: Dream Theater: Metropolis Pt 2: Scenes from a Memory
Update: several people have responded that they
cannot reproduce the problem. I thus created a new profile,
uninstalled all system-wide extensions, removed all plugins such
that about:plugins was empty and tried again. The
problems persist, although I think the lags are not quite as long
as before and the memory consumption is obviously down. Maybe this
is amd64-related?
Update: It’s not amd64-related, as
several users have pointed out.
Update: still no luck, but James Andrewart pointed me to this bug report, which might improve things a bit:
“The new protocol specifies a single lookup algorithm for all tables, rather than having per-table logic. This lookup logic was moved in to the db service from the javascript.
URL canonicalization was moved completely into C++ too. The DB service can now handle a query from a raw URI, which will be needed for malware blocking.”
