Speed up Firefox - Disable Pocket integration and use uBlock

After trying Safari for few months on my MBP, I wanted to move back to Firefox, mostly because I was missing the extensions.

However, after I downloaded and installed the latest Firefox (FF v38 and updated to 39) I found it very slow. It was so slow that it started getting me annoyed and I move back and forth between Safari and Firefox and Chrome. Tried using Activity Monitor on OSX and found that FF was using around 2GB of RAM.

Yes, I confess that I had lot of tabs open together (around 30 at least) but still 2GB was way too high. Safari with around half the numbers of tabs was using less than 200 MB of RAM.

I was about to uninstall FF from my system. Fortunately, I came across this LifeHacker article which tells you how to disable the default pocket integration to save memory. To be honest, I was very happy when I found Pocket integrated with FF. But I am not going to use Pocket that way at the cost of overall system performance.

The step to remove the integration is very easy
1. Just hit the 'about:config' and
2. Set 'browser.pocket.enable' to False.
3. You may want to restart the browser, just to make sure.

and by god, the memory uses got reduced by more than 60%. FF was now using around 800 MB of RAM. That was really surprising.

This motivated me to try more and I finally replaced AdBlock Plus with uBlock.

My FF is now using less than 500 MB of RAM for the same number of tabs that I still have open.

The 'Closing Words' on this gHacks article clearly summarize my thoughts.

and for Pocket, I am happy for now with their web app. May be I will re-enable the integration after an upgrade hoping the team have reduced the memory requirement.

Python virtualenv - Facts

Following the best practices of industry, just installed Python Virtual Environments in Mavericks. But every time I try to 'activate', which should have changed the command prompt, nothing happens... just nothing.

Searched all over the web but nobody seems to have the issue I am having... must be doing something foolish and I was...

Fact-1
You have to activate using 'source' command. So basically you have to type
Virtualenvs% source .bin/activate

and voila...

Being curious when looked inside 'activate' found that its just a simple shell script which sets few environment variables like VIRTUAL_ENV and PATH so that we don't have to.


Next thing that kept me confused for few hours is, what the heck is happening when I am installing new packages using 'pip' from inside my virtual env. Can't find any new folders created in 'include' or 'lib'... no new binaries in bin...

where are all those downloaded files disappearing into?

Fact-2
Anything you install inside a virtual environment will get stored inside the python site-packages folder which is under the lib folder. In my case it was
lib/python2.7/site-packages


and the learning continues...