Firefox problem and workaround

For a while, I’d been having a problem where firefox would beach ball (aka hang) a lot on my mac. It wouldn’t be hitting the CPU, which seemed quite confusing. This behavior was much more pronounced when I was on a high-latency connection, like the ones on the shuttles to/from work. Sometimes, the problem wouldn’t happen at all.

Last night I finally decided to look into this, and found this bug: if you’re using a proxy configuration from a PAC URL, the browser hangs when it resolves DNS queries (it’s the result of some apple weirdness). So, my workaround is to not use the PAC file whenever possible (I only need it a few times a day). I guess this is only a workaround in a certain sense, but whatever. Since I made the change, I haven’t had any beach balls.

I’ve installed the switchproxy extension to make switching the proxy on and off really easy.