Wednesday, April 09, 2008

DownThemAll Causing Firefox Problems

A few weeks back, I started noticing that, after some initial, trouble-free browsing in Firefox 2.0.0.12, subsequent page loads would just stop working. It wasn't a full hang, as the browser was still responsive, but pages would take an inordinately long time to load, or just time out completely.

The problem persisted through 2.0.0.13, and disabling all extensions didn't seem to help. I did find that toggling "Work Offline" would clear things up for a little bit, and I used it as a workaround for a while. But that got old pretty quick.

I took a look at my about:config network settings, and stumbled on to the fact that my network.http.max-connections had set itself to 74. I moved it back to a more reasonable number (48), and that fixed it. Regular browsing resumed, and I disabled FasterFox, which I figured (incorrectly) was causing the trouble.

The problem started recurring intermittently. Since I knew what to look for, it was easy to fix, but I did a little more looking and finally found that the problem was coming from DownThemAll (not "down the mall"), and that it was a known issue. So now I know. And knowing is approximately 50 percent of the battle.

DownThemAll is a stunningly useful Firefox extension, in that it makes batch downloading of files linked from Web pages really easy. So, if you're looking at a page that has lots of, say, image thumbnails that link off to source images (alright, I'll say it: porn. DownThemAll is really good for downloading porn), DownThemAll is a quick way to snag them all.

I'm sure it's also useful to other photography enthusiasts and such.

2 comments:

Daniel Poehlman said...

I don't have DownThemAll, but ever since I've started coming here, for some reason, loading your blog chokes my browser and freezes it up for a bit.

It's almost as if I was opening up a big PDF where everything just gets stuck for a while.

I'm thinking it's that damn AIM widget.

Anonymous said...

DownThemAll gets worse and worse with every release.