In the past week or so Firefox has been very slow and generally unpredictable on my machine. I’ve done a bit of everything to try and correct it– reinstalled Firefox, upgraded to Windows XP SP2, upgraded my various security software (firewall, AV, anti-spyware), disabled various bits of software, etc. I tried a bit of everything and nothing seemed to work.

Eventually I started tracing the patterns of when Firefox would lock-up, and it was each time a new browser window was spawned. I started uninstalling all of the features which seemed like they might calling out to the intarweb or somehow interfering with network calls each time a new window was spawned, including Live HTTPHeaders, BugMeNot, GMail Notifier, and ForecastFox.. none of these seemed to help the problem.

Finally I did the thing I should of done from the beginning when I had these problems– tried to see what Firefox wanted to connect to when it spawned a new window. I noticed an outgoing connection to nettripper.com each time a new window was spawned. I went to Google that domain, and as it turns out, that’s the site for the SwitchProxy extention. I assume it’s maybe just checking for an update or something, but I haven’t actually looked at what it sends/recieves there, so I can’t comment on it at the moment. Anyhow, I uninstalled the SwitchProxy extention, and suddenly Firefox doesn’t suck again. What a pain!