Browser slowdown: cause: global menu integration with many bookmarks

[Akima]

OS: Ubuntu Desktop 14.04.5 LTS (fully up to date)
Firefox: 48.0 build 2 (it's the package supplied by default in Ubuntu)

The problem:
I have ~2200 bookmarks in my Firefox profile. These are being displayed in the Unity global menu. This causes the following problems:
 * Firefox becomes unresponsive for roughly 2 seconds every 15 seconds.
 * The Ubuntu Unity global menu system itself starts to misbehave.

Regarding the "misbehaving". One example is this. My email client has a menu bar. When Firefox is running in the background and my mail client is focused, I can press the Alt key to search the menu. I type a few key strokes and I then hit enter on the option I want. Nothing happens. So the menu searching and displaying is working but you can't actually activate an item. This issue only occurs with Firefox running.

Work-around:
go to: about:config
set: ui.use_unity_menubar;false
observe that Firefox is now once again responsive to use.

My old work-around:
Before Firefox 48.0 I was able to work around this issue by simply making sure that the vast majority of my bookmarks were not displayed in the "Bookmarks Menu". Now that the latest release of Firefox has forced all bookmarks (including "Other Bookmarks") to appear in the menu, this work around does not work. So I now have to disable Unity menu bar integration.

One possible fix:
Override the new Firefox behaviour that forces "Other Bookmarks" to display in the menu. This means users have the option of making their bookmarks not be loaded into the Unity global menu. If you did this, it may also be worth adding some code to detect vast numbers of bookmarks being displayed in the global menu. When this occurs you could display a message to the user informing them that they should move bookmarks out of the "Bookmarks Menu" and into "Other Bookmarks" (as visible in the Firefox "Library").

I expect I'm not the only long-term Firefox user to have built up over 2000 bookmarks. I expect many users wont be able to find the cause of the Firefox slow downs and global menu misbehaving, so they will be stuck with it or will switch to another browser.

[Akima (8-me-w)]

I have found 3 more bug reports which look like they may be referring to the same issue:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1081485
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/968533
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/1132234

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner. You reported this bug some time ago and there have been many changes in Ubuntu and Firefox since that time.

Do you still see a problem related to the one that you reported using a currently supported version of Ubuntu? Please let us know if you do otherwise this report can be left to expire in approximately 60 days time.

Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.

Paul White
[Ubuntu Bug Squad]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for firefox (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]