Firefox Feed Sidebar
Well, I think I’ve finally gotten tired of the Feed Sidebar extension for reading RSS feeds in Firefox. Pretty much ever since I discovered it, Feed Sidebar has been my preferred extension for dealing with RSS. In a lot of ways, Feed Sidebar acts and feels exactly the way I believe Live Bookmarks should have been made to work in the first place, presenting a minimalist but usable interface that works neatly from within the familiar browser screens. Unfortunately, when Firefox 3 came out, the author added some new bugs which have resulted in making the extension extremely frustrating. With no indication that bug fixes are anywhere on the horizon, I’ve finally decided to take a look at the source code in hope of being able to contribute back bug fixes to make the extension usable again. This post is essentially my initial list of thoughts on rehabilitating the Feed Sidebar.
To begin with, let me briefly describe the kinds of problems I’ve been having with the extension. Starting with the Firefox 3 updates, the extension has felt quite a bit slower than it used to and it also leaks memory like a sieve. For a browser which made a huge deal out of becoming faster and more memory efficient, it’s profoundly disappointing to me that this extension seems to have gone in exactly the opposite direction. The memory problem for me is so severe that I find myself needing to close the browser every few hours just to keep Firefox running happily within my 1GB of RAM. Since I would otherwise keep Firefox open for days, this is a major inconvenience and is definitely not right. Worst of all, it looks like others have had similar kinds of problems.
Right now, my primary theory is that the problem with memory usage is directly related to the new caching feature added in the Firefox 3 release. According to the author’s blog, the extension now caches all of your feeds, so if you go offline, you still have access to all of the data that was in the feeds, and you can read it while offline.
Assuming the user has more than a trivial number of feeds and assuming that at least some of those feeds update frequently, Feed Sidebar might be doing a lot of caching. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if Feed Sidebar recaches every item on every refresh, which would cause a lot of resource drain. I still need to look around in the code to figure out how much of this theory is correct, but it seems like the most likely thing so far.
Your concerns are valid, but the new features for Firefox 3 aren’t the cause of the memory leaks. (Sadly, it leaked memory just as badly in Firefox 2). I am working on fixing them, but the progress is slow.
Thanks for the comment. That’s certainly interesting to know since I never noticed the problem in Firefox 2, or perhaps I did but attributed it to something else. Since you say progress has been a bit slow for you, I wonder if you would be interested in opening up a bit of collaboration toward the goal of getting this issue fixed.
The source is available at http://code.google.com/p/feedsidebar/source/checkout if anyone is interested in working with it.