iGoogle Calendar Causes Freeze-up on Firefox
I have been experiencing some kind of "freeze-up" while opening multiple tabs in Firefox, and most of the time, I notice, they come when iGoogle auto-refreshes. I was wondering what was causing this problem and now I can see that the culprit seems to be the Google Calendar Gadget.
Below I tried refreshing iGoogle a few times and recorded the CPU loading. The first screenshot refers to refreshes without the Calendar gadget. The second one shows the loading for four refreshes with the Calendar gadget. The third one records the refreshes after removing the Calendar again.
To make sure nothing else was causing the spikes, other applications, apart from Anti-Virus and Firewall, were closed and the refreshes were done multiple times. 
Also to make sure that the extensions were not causing the problems, I tried the test in Firefox (Safe Mode). From the patterns, we can pretty well see that without the Calendar gadget, the loading was much less than when the page was refreshed with the gadget. In the screenshot below, you can see that the first two peaks refer to refreshes with Calendar gadget on, and the last two to those without Calendar gadget on the page.
I also did similar tests on IE7 with and without Calendar gadget, but there was no significant difference in the loading of the CPU. I didn't do any test on Safari and Opera though.
These CPU loading peaks may not be significant with higher power CPU but they do freeze up my Firefox for a while (during its reloading stage) on my laptop with an Intel Pentium M. (This has nothing to do with the amount of RAM, considering that I have 2GB of it and it is not affected during the refreshes.) That is simply annoying, especially when I'm multitasking.
I tried a first solution: I kept the gadget but closes the iGoogle home page while I'm opening multiple tabs and don't want to be annoyed. But, it didn't work; most of the time, I find myself leaving iGoogle open always through my Firefox session. So, I came up with the second and more drastic solution: I removed the Calendar gadget (which is quite useful to me) and force myself to use the calendar page to use my Google Calendar.
I hope it is not only me who's troubled by the freeze-up's in Firefox caused by Google Calendar Gadget, and I hope later versions of Firefox will handle it better (if this is at all caused by the way Firefox handles that xml).
Until then...
Justin
Technorati Tag: Firefox, Google Calendar
5 comment(s):
Justin I totally concure with your conclusions. I have been experiencing the same things and have also found that the Igoogle Calendar just hogs all the resources when loading. Hopefully they will figure this out and get a fix in place.
Same here, on a thinkpad T60 (1.86ghz core duo) with 1.5gb ram. I also noticed that the layout (text size?) of the applet changed a few days ago and assumed that the problems were related to these changes.
mfg
fechter
I've been experiencing the same issue (I just started using the Calendar widget). Actually, I found your post as I was searching for a fix. By the date of your post it looks like it has been this way for a while; hopefully Google will not ignore the issue.
Got the same issue, not just Calendar for me, still working on it
I agree. I've started using Firefox 3.03 and iGoogle just freezes the browser even before it loads.
Leave your comment