Firefox high CPU

[darkoshi]

The latest version of the Context Search add-on (3.66) for Firefox seems to have a bug causing high CPU and disk usage.
See the Github problem page.

Disabling the add-on and restarting Firefox prevents the problem. (you may need to kill Firefox from Task Manager).

Comments

[marahmarie]

I don't use the add-on in question but in looking for something similar, found this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/swift-selection-search/?src=search which I'm about to try, because neato, I didn't know add-ons could add more right-click search engine options than whatever the browser's default is.

I also thought about an add-on I used to use: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-to-search-bar/ but it's not the same thing (you add a website's search box as a search engine to the browser search dropdown, with this one) and isn't available on Quantum, anyhow (though of course it could still work in Waterfox/other forks and in ESR until Mozilla kills it, soon enough).

ETA: Swift Selection is pretty neat, so far (been using it for just a minute, with the jason file added to import all the search engines in the search bar). Highlighting (without right-clicking) produces a horizontal strip of search engine icons; right-clicking shows an item in the dropdown menu where if you hover over it, the search engine icons display in a list off to the side.

[darkoshi]

Swift Selection looks like it has the same features, so it is probably a good alternative. I think Context Search will be fixed soon (I see a fix was committed to Github, but it's not on the FF site yet), so I'll wait.

Did you know you can add an entry for Google Maps, so that you can highlight an address and bring up a map for it? Besides search engines and dictionaries, that's what I use it for most. You should be able to do it in Swift Selection too:
https://maps.google.com/?q=[searchTerms]

[marahmarie]

Did you know you can add an entry for Google Maps

No, but once I tried, that was with a few caveats: you have to change angle brackets to curly brackets and look up/add the favicon URL yourself. For some reason I pasted the Maps .ico URL into Amazon's slot, and now I can't find the address to restore Amazon's! :/

ETA4: Got the Amazon favicon back by guessing what the URL might be, so that's sorted. Will probably do the same for the favicons discussed in ETA2.

The CSS for SSS's horizontal strip leaves something to be desired, too (icons don't appear to be spaced evenly, jamming together in some spots, spread out in others).

ETA2: and there's a reason for this! Once you import the search bar search engines the add-on pulls favicon sources from two incorrect places: resource://search-plugins/images/ebay.ico and resource://search-plugins/images/wikipedia.ico. Neither actually produces an icon in the add-on, which explains the gaps in the strip. But the other icons are still too jammed together.

I'm not sure what the licensing for SSS looks like but if it's permissive enough I could just rewrite the CSS myself, if I ever get that much free time on my hands.

ETA5: I'd actually need to rewrite the CSS since the add-on options for horizontal spacing don't seem to work. The first one (Popup horizontal padding) only controls padding to the left and right of the icon strip. The second (Popup horizontal offset) has no effect whatsoever, no matter how high I set it (example of how high: 66px). Changing display from horizontal to grid produces centered icons which makes the grid pretty wonky, especially if the bottom grid row doesn't have enough icons to fill it.

ETA: Also, the dev coded Google site search backward; it should be site: example.com [search terms]; they've got coded as [search terms] site:example.com (and in testing, flipping this around breaks Fx's ability to deal: it tells you you need an add-on to display whatever the add-on is trying to display! So I can't see a fix for that just yet).

ETA3: given the problems I've found so far (and I've no more than glanced at this thing for a few seconds; there might be more if I *really* peek under the hood) maybe you're right to just wait for the original add-on to be fixed! I haven't tried it myself - and don't want to if it's going to eat CPU, but if the fix calms that down and if you could let me know, I would try it now just for comparison purposes.

re: ETA3

[darkoshi]

Swift has almost 3 times as many users as Context Search, so it may have been around longer. Both have pretty good reviews. The Context Search bug has been fixed now in v3.67, though the search engine favicons aren't showing up for me now so I'm not sure it has fewer problems than Swift. But I don't rely on the favicons anyway; I use the text context menu entries.

Re: ETA3

[marahmarie]

I think text context menu entries are listed as an enhancement bug on SSS's Github page (doesn't have them yet). I'll try Context Menu now, assuming the AMO version got the fix.

Edit Actually, it does have them (in a right-click context menu dropdown list); for some reason I was envisioning something else (a text version of the icon grid?), which I can't actually find in open or closed enhancement bugs. Edit again: yes, I can: it's here: https://github.com/CanisLupus/swift-selection-search/issues/95 (an issue that hasn't been moved to enhancement yet, apparently!)

But anyhow, when enabling icon grid in Context Search, right-click URLs is disabled. SSS doesn't have that issue.

CS does have a lot more default search engines to choose from (including a lot I've literally never seen before, and some of which I'm intrigued by) and nicer icon grids (left-right justified as opposed to centered in SSS, which is just hideous).

CS disables right-click context menus altogether in icon grid view, while SSS doesn't (if you right-click, you get the normal menu), so overall I'm thinking I'd rather eventually unpack the SSS add-on and adjust the CSS (it has an MIT license) and submit bugs for the broken site search (this is working correctly now; hmmm), broken horizontal display option (this is working now, too; don't know why it wasn't before) and missing favicons (add-on dev warns about this on the Options page, as far as resource:/// links go, so no point I guess) than stick with CS.

Re: ETA3

[darkoshi]

> But anyhow, when enabling icon grid in Context Search, right-click URLs is disabled. SSS doesn't have that issue.

That would be a deal-breaker for me too, if I wanted to use the icon grid.

> CS does have a lot more default search engines to choose from (including a lot I've literally never seen before, and some of which I'm intrigued by)

That struck me in the beginning too. I tried a few of them out, and left most of them in the list for whenever I'm feeling adventurous.

Re: ETA3

[marahmarie]

Yeah, I want to use the grid (or at least the strip, which I also like, and SSS has). So I unpacked the XPI and have been futzing with that, but doing so hasn't solved the problems I'm having with the grid (I changed a text-align: center value to left and actually zeroed out all horizontal padding values, but zeroing out one or or more of them (not sure which one(s) just yet) created a 20px gap at the bottom of the grid only when icons are evenly divided between rows (when divided so that less than the amount of icons in the rows above are left over in the last row, the last row, though not the ones above, will just center again, which still looks awful).

But I'll look at the code for that again another time, since it comes down to how I don't think I've figured out *exactly* what I need to change (or add).

I tried a few of them out, and left most of them in the list for whenever I'm feeling adventurous.

I'm actually going to cross-reference them so I can add the more interesting sounding ones to SSS.

Wait a sec....

[marahmarie]

Which version are you using?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/context-search/ (not compatible with Quantum, 19k+ users)

Or

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/contextual-search/?src=search (compatible with Quantum, 6K+ users)

Not touching either until you let me know, thanks.

Edit: never mind, you're using the Quantum version, according to the first line of your top post. Seeing both just threw me for a second...wondering if, when the older add-on got broken by Quantum, if new devs took over the old code or if this is just another add-on, altogether.

Re: ETA2

[marahmarie]

Weirdly enough I can't find a working favicon for eBay (at least, not yet). These two URLs should work: https://pages.ebay.com/favicon.ico (per page source) and https://my.ebay.com/favicon.ico (per Google search result) but in the add-on, neither one does (I just get the broken image image) leading me to wonder if eBay actually write-protects their favicon, somehow (could they? Is that even a thing one can do?).

ETA on ETA2: Got that sorted, too. eBay must protect their most commonly accessed favicons, somehow, so assuming they do, I went to a less-used part of the site found in a randomly clicked Google result (https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/New-eBay-Classifieds/ba-p/26162893) and grabbed the URL from the page source there (https://ebay01.i.lithium.com/html/assets/favicon.ico?01D4DACF6F94F47362F4432C698E2F34 - the part between strikethroughs is actually not needed, and probably best to not use so eBay can't easily trace it back). Same favicon and works like a charm.