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Is there anything in the current Firefox 3.x similar to shift-esc in Google Chrome?

There is something that occasionally takes up enough CPU to make Firefox unresponsive - but with multiple windows, each with a dozen or so tabs open, trial & error is going to take a while.

Suggestions?

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No, there is no way to natively do this. I won't post an answer though because there might be some third-party solution. – Sasha Chedygov Jan 31 '11 at 0:34
I found this via google, it's a plugin. addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab ...Makes it so (supposedly) the tab doesn't use resources until you click on it and are actively viewing it. From the user comments it may not work exactly as advertised, and apparently in firefox4 this is native behavior without the plugin. Personally I'd try ff4 if you aren't already. – CreeDorofl Mar 27 '11 at 21:27
Firefox doesn’t use separate processes for each tab and plugin like Chrome does, so it has no reason to have a task-manager like Chrome’s. – Synetech Aug 27 '11 at 3:48
You should really consider to upgrade, development is already at 10.x... – Tom Wijsman Nov 26 '11 at 8:38
@Tom: I was current when this question was asked :) – chris Nov 26 '11 at 19:50
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3 Answers

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about:memory shows Firefox's memory usage details. There's also a button on that page that allows you to minimize memory usage.

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Do you have Flashblock or NoScript installed? Especially if not, I'd try to look into the flash-heavy tabs first. I've also seen lots of eBay tabs grind Firefox to a halt, albeit that was a while back (when I was actually using eBay).

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Yes to both, as well as ad-block plus. But there's still something that's periodically using CPU. – chris Jan 31 '11 at 19:16
Then my next thought would be JavaScript-heavy sites that you allow through NoScript. – farfromhome Jan 31 '11 at 19:38
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The following answer to another question may help you. The answer is written by the user "accolade".

XUL Profiler is an awesome extension that can point out extensions and client side JS gone bananas CPU-wise. It does not work on a per-tab basis, but per-script (or so). You can normally relate those .js scripts to your tabs or extensions by hand.

It is also worth mentioning that Google Chrome has built-in a really good task manager that gives memory and CPU usage per tab, extension and plugin.

Let me add some more info to accolade's answer. As of January 2012, the latest version of XUL Profiler is 1.0.4, released December 2008. It's only certified compatible with Firefox 2.0 - 3.6.*. So it clearly needs a new maintainer.

I wonder if there's any way to force the extension to work on newer Firefox versions.

Also, I wonder if it works well to downgrade Firefox temporarily in order to use XUL Profiler with your existing tabs on a certified-compatible Firefox version.

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