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How to turn off Green Loading circles - CPU burners

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  • Last reply by rhhardin

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FIrefox 27.0 - 31.0 all burn useless cpu cycles on loading pages on XP Home.

I've very sure that it's from the green tab loading animated cicles.

Is there a way to turn these off?

The manual ways are

1. Minimize Firefox until it finishes loading the page

2. Cover the tab line with a wide thin notepad or something until it finishes loading.

Both of which fix the problem but you have to juggle stuff to do it.

XP Home apparently can't handle whatever method is used to do the animated circles. It even displaces Task Manager at "above normal" priority, and any sound you have streaming elsewhere.

I have a 1.3 GHz single core cpu, XP Home.

FIrefox 27.0 - 31.0 all burn useless cpu cycles on loading pages on XP Home. I've very sure that it's from the green tab loading animated cicles. Is there a way to turn these off? The manual ways are 1. Minimize Firefox until it finishes loading the page 2. Cover the tab line with a wide thin notepad or something until it finishes loading. Both of which fix the problem but you have to juggle stuff to do it. XP Home apparently can't handle whatever method is used to do the animated circles. It even displaces Task Manager at "above normal" priority, and any sound you have streaming elsewhere. I have a 1.3 GHz single core cpu, XP Home.

All Replies (4)

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The loading circles don't use an appreciable amount of CPU, and if they did, covering them up won't make things better.

You should investigate other sources of computer slowdown.

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Why not? There's some system call at the bottom of the animated circles, and that's enough to bring XP Home to a stop.

In particular, it's enough of a bottleneck to stop Task Manager, which runs at "above normal" priority itself.

Not to mention displacing any progress that Firefox itself tries to make in loading the page.

This is a huge and long-standing problem (since 27.0).

Everything runs fine with 26.0

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Those images are nothing more than animated PNG files run by Firefox while a page is loading. did you try the other steps I suggested?

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I disabled flash (no difference) and have long ago done the hardware acceleration off/on (no difference) and run in safe mode (no difference).

Any theory has to account for why 26.0 and previous still work.

The png files nevertheless do system calls. How much time they use depends on how fast they do it. I'd guess it's way too fast.

Where are these png files? Can I replace them with something idle?

I'd guess that the system ignores the call if their bit of screen isn't visible, and the overhead goes to nearly zero. Otherwise it does a lot of work at a high priority, and screws everybody sup.