Anyone who runs a Microsoft OS should do themselves a favour and become familiar with Bryce Cogwell and Mark Russinovich’s apps. Formerly an independent company, Winternals (and the Sysinternals website through which they published their apps) were taken over by Microsoft in July 2006. The apps that Winternals made are still available (and still developed by Mark and Bryce, I think) and they’re well worth checking out.

The reason I mention this is because I’ve finally fixed a problem that I’ve been having with Firefox and I probably wouldn’t ever have figured it out without a Sysinternals tool. For months now, Firefox has been freezing for up to 30 seconds every time I start it or open a new window. I prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer but this problem had made it pretty frustrating to use. This evening I decided to sit down and suss it out. After a fruitless search on Bugzilla I hit upon the idea of using Process Monitor to see if I could work out what Firefox was doing (or trying to do) when it was freezing. Turns out it was attempting to retrieve a favicon for a bookmark in the Bookmark Toolbar. This particular bookmark points to an HTML page on a share on my company’s network (I use Google Browser Sync to share my bookmarks between my home PC and my work laptop).

Firstly, there isn’t a favicon and – more importantly – though the share in question is available across my VPN, I’ve never actually logged onto it from home (and have thus never cached the credentials locally). Instead of prompting me to authenticate the share, Firefox just repeatedly tried to retrieve the favicon until it hit whatever internal timeout. And because the bookmark in question is on the Bookmark Toolbar, Firefox was attempting to load the favicon every time it started or opened a new window (even on pages that don’t display a favicon, stupidly – I should raise a bug report for this I suppose). I deleted the bookmark and now I Firefox is as nippy as it should be. Yay!