As I sit here right now my laptop is uncomfortably hot and its fans are making a really loud high pitched whine. Something on my computer is spinning the CPU and it’s making me literally hot. I look at the processes and FireFox is taking between 40% and 80% of the CPU! I’m basically sitting idle too. Well, right now I’m typing this message in Firefox, but 5 minutes ago the computer was sitting unattended and it was still going nuts.

Ok, so Firefox is wigging. But why? I can’t find any way to do some introspection. I suspect it’s one or two errant pages sitting in a tight javascript or flash loop. But how can I find out which pages? I have 26 windows open and most windows have multiple tabs open each (one has 30 tabs). Each of them is open for a reason–some unfinished business I have at each page, so I can’t just close them randomly. Besides, that would admit defeat.

What I need is a plug-in that monitors all the javascript and plugins that are running and keeps track of how long each runs. Then I want a unix top-like view of all the open pages and how many resources each is consuming (how much memory, how much cpu time their javascript is taking, etc). Why doesn’t this already exist? Sadly I just don’t have time right now to write such a thing, considering how much I’d have to first learn about the internal workings of Mozilla threads (I assume they are all green threads, because something is running so much my typing has a significant delay every few seconds).

Please, please, please (let me get what I want) won’t somebody write something like this? How do you Mozilla developers work? Is there a Javascript profiler available already? I’ve searched the add-ons before but I can’t find anything like this.

All I know is my lap is getting hot and I can’t do anything about it because I need Firefox open right now and it’s beginning to really annoy me.