Just as a small warning to anyone out there with Firefox who has the Cooliris extension/plugin installed. I am currently running firefox 3.6.* on Win Vista 32-bit Home Premium. Several months ago I began to notice that my browser would stall, freeze, lockup, or do some other strange thing when I tried to click a link, open a new page, or watch streaming content. It wouldn't happen all the time, but about every 20-30 seconds my browser would stall for 2-3 seconds, which doesn't sound like much but when it happens constantly it can be VERY annoying. Also, Firefox typically was using between 300k and 500k memory, which is insane, even with only one browser window open and 2-5 tabs with average content. So, I went through my add-ons and extensions one by one, until I tried removing Cooliris just for the heck of it. I restarted Firefox and.... Completely fixed. The average memory usage is back down to the more normal 100-150k, and I am experiencing absolutely 0 skipping/freezing/stalling or high memory usage as before. Just to test it out, I reinstalled the Cooliris plugin, restarted Firefox, and began opening a few tabs. After around 10 minutes, my old problem was back again. The browser began to freeze up for 1-3 seconds every 20-30 seconds, almost like clockwork. Memory usage was back up to 300-500k. Uninstalled Cooliris again, boom. Completely fixed with no problems. So, I just figured I would share my findings with you all here, in case someone here has been experiencing the same problem as I have. If you're running Firefox (or any browser supporting Cooliris), and you are experiencing stalling, freezing, lagging, high memory usage, or any similar thing, try removing (that means totally uninstalling, not disabling) Cooliris from your browser's add-ons. You might be pleasantly surprised. I hope I could help someone with this info.
Thank you, Superstring. I believe I had a similar problem. I have only 500M of memory. I suppose you can't get all these cool add-on's for Firefox without paying the price in memory usage. I will try again when I get more memory.
Thank you very much for bringing up this issue, we are extremely sorry that you have had these issues! We would be happy to help you troubleshoot this issue and resolve it so you can enjoy the use of Cooliris. This is not a typical issue so we would love to figure out why it might be happening. If you are interested in getting personalized tech support, please email bugs@cooliris.com and we will do everything we can to get Cooliris working for you.
Thanks, Cooliris support, for responding so quickly. I didn't mention in my previous post that I also had CoolPreviews installed, so this may have been an additional drain on my Firefox memory space. I looked more closely at the Cooliris add-on page, and found that a Core Duo processor was required, which I don't have -- I have this CPU (according to System Information): x86 Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 4 GenuineIntel ~2253 Mhz, with 512M of Ram. That may also be part of the memory problem, although the program itself seems to function well on my machine. I did additional testing and took down some actual figures for active and virtual (paged) memory in my machine, before and after installing Cooliris alone: active / virtual Cooliris installed: 318,344 K / 374,824 K (and probably including Cooliris tab opened) Cooliris disabled: 84,416 K / 70,556 K Cooliris installed (3 tabs open in Firefox): 324,400 K / 308,236 K (including Cooliris tab opened) After closing Cooliris tab, with 3 other tabs open: 223,712 K / 220,676 K 2nd reading, after changing non-Cooliris tabs: 250,748 K / 256,468 K After Cooliris disabled, same 3 tabs open as previous reading: 86,884 K / 70,232 K I suppose one possible solution, for those who don't have enough memory, would be to recommend closing all nonessential programs and Firefox tabs when using Cooliris, and for Cooliris to somehow reclaim for use by Cooliris any nonessential Firefox memory which is inaccessible to the user, and store this memory on disk temporarily, until the Cooliris tab is closed, then restore that memory and finally totally release all the Cooliris Firefox memory. I can't remember now exactly what was happening before (before my first post) when I had both Cool programs installed, but I know one or both were using a lot of memory and my system was slowing down. FLASH: I just additionally reinstalled Cool Previews and it doesn't seem to be using up a lot of memory. Here are the figures: Cooliris disabled - CoolPreviews disabled - 5 FF tabs open 112,740 K / 100,192 K Cooliris disabled - CoolPreviews enabled with one subwindow open - 5 FF tabs open 135,000 K / 118,100 K Anyway, they're great programs. I hope to be able to make use of them efficiently, especially after I get more memory and a better processor. I may be in touch later with the Cooliris support team away from the forum, and I will try to report back if there are any new developments.