Tech Tidbits

Tired of having to “Load Images” or accept images from a site? There is a solution that is not very hard to implement. The following procedure will accept or display all remote images by default. Follow the steps exactly to avoid damaging your Thunderbird configuration. Selecting the wrong entry to edit could make a total mess of your Thunderbird.

1. Open Thunderbird
2. Select the Tools dropdown menu at top of screen
3. Select Options
4. At the top of the Options window, select Advanced
5. Select Config Editor which will take you to an about:Config window
6. In the “Filter:” box, type mailnews which will filter the file and give you all the lines that have “mailnews” in them
7. Scroll down to the line that says mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image
8. Click on (highlight) that line
9. Observe that the value for this Preference Name is “true”, which means that remote images are disabled
10. Double-click the line to change the value OR right-click and select “Toggle”
11. Verify that value is now “false”, which means that the display is NOT disabled
12. Close the about:Config window
13. Close the Options window
14. Restart Thunderbird

The next time an email with remote images is in your inbox, there won’t be that little question at the top of the email asking “Load Images” or “Check here to always load…” After you know this is working, you might want to go through your Address Book and clear out all those entries you no longer need, especially if you put them in your Personal Address Book (which is where they went by default). It was possible to create a new Address Book, and rather than clicking on the “Check here to always…” line, if you right-clicked, you got a popup window, with a dropdown where you could select the Address Book that would be used.

The saga began over a month ago – seemed to take an interminable amount of time to load pages into a foreground tab. Also got lots of “server not found” error messages. Then came the Anti-Virus subscription expiration and new software, and "it seemed to run slower". issues. This was happening on both desktops (mine and my wife's). Thinking something was wrong with the computer, I started there, because they were Celeron 2.4 GHZ machines, and had not been cleaned up for some time. Actually, our 1.7 GHZ ThinkPads (Pentium M) were running faster! General cleaning – dust out, check cables, run diagnostics, etc.

Corrected an error in mismatched memory and installed new NICs (onboard NICs were ranked as abysmal!) Nothing in hardware was going to solve the problem. Actually found that one of the replacement cards was at least 300 times faster than what was onboard!

After getting started on the software cleanup, remembered that just last year, I had replaced my hard drive (second time) using "Maxblast" to move the HD over, there was a full reinstall after that, because it was not acting right (yes, everything was reinstalled), so it couldn't need a Windows reinstall again (well, with Windows anything is possible). However on my wife's machine, there had not been a cleanup for over two years since a malware attack chewed throw her machine.

Registry cleaning with Registry Mechanic found lots of errors, but nothing seemed to resolve the 100% CPU usage. On the other hand, both our laptops were fine – no hangs. Did searches on Google and Mozillazine for anything closely resembling "Firefox Slowdown" or "Firefox Tweak" – nothing! Even followed the Mozillazine list of how to diagnose problems in Firefox. I got really familiar with "about:config" and supposedly how to make Firefox faster. Still nothing!

Another point – both our machines have been upgraded from Netscape (Windows and OS/2) to Mozilla 0.x (zero) to Mozilla 1 then 2 and now 3, bringing over profiles and settings each step of the way. In fact, some of the entries in "about:config" were from when the profile covered both mail (now Thunderbird) and web browsing, so there was lots of junk to clear out.

Had found a work around that involved a batch file to change the priority at which FireFor runs, but did not think that was the right answer (although it kinda/sorta worked).

FINALLY my search for "Firefox 3 high CPU use" led to the blog of GMG (Green Mountain Geek). He had actually seen all those posts from people who were mad as hornets about the poor performance of FF 3. On top of that he was encountering some of the same problems and could duplicate them. His answer was to change a parameter in "about:config". Seems that his testing indicated a problem with memory cache.

A light bulb went off in my brain! Celeron processors do not have a lot of cache, and what was happening was that FF was trying to stuff bytes in someplace that does not exist. On a full Pentium you have much more cache, which could easily account for why the ThinkPads did not exhibit the same problem.

Made the change, and it was like a miracle! BAM! There was the web page without the 30 to 240 second wait.

Thank you to Kirk at GMG for finally finding the answer, and for posting it to his blog.

Well, have determined that I am not the only person in the world who is witnessing a slowdown in my browser. Finally dug deep enough on the Mozilla site, and found that this is an open and festering sore! Sure hope that someone is paying attention to all the posts that have a definite indication that 3.X has a problem.

Some of the key signs are slow page loads, interminable delays in even starting to look for a site and slow page rendering. Maybe the Mozilla team needs to have a "Go To Meeting" (notice, not a MS "LiveMeeting") to discuss what people are finding across operating systems! There are posters on Linux, Mac and Windows all having the same problem, so it is not in the "port".

FF used to load and run faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Now people are having to go back to IE because of the problems.

Guys, this should be easy – look at what you changed from 2.X to 3.X. Get a profile from a user that is having problems, run it in your lab and see what is happening and then work on fixing it.

Maybe I need to report the problem to "Bugzilla".