All versions of Firefox 3.x have been affected by a strange “bug”: all Flash-related content has a tendency to “stutter” every few seconds (especially YouTube videos, but also non-video things like those “Know It All” quizzes on Facebook).
Back on November 30, 2008 I posted this article, in which I postulated that the problem was related to Firefox’s “session saving” capability. In fact, I specifically said:
Disable anything that saves your sessions (tabs). This not only includes extensions like SessionSaver or Weave, but also Firefox’s built-in session saving tool.
So it was somewhat surprising to see that someone else had stumbled across the “solution” to the problem this week in posts at Lifehacker and Download Squad.
Do I get “attboy” and “THANK YOU!!!” posts on this site? Nooooooo, I sure don’t! Such is life on the Internet, I guess.
I will admit that the “Lifehacker solution” is a bit more elegant: go to about:config and change the value of:
browser.sessionstore.interval
from 10000 (milliseconds) to 300000 (milliseconds). This changes how often Firefox saves your session information from every 10 seconds to every 5 minutes, which, while not eliminating the stuttering completely, should drastically reduce them.
Can anyone tell me if Firefox automatically saves a session on close, regardless of the interval settings?