Wow… just wow:
Again I was rewarded with a long pause, disk crunching and a blank screen, until 30-35 seconds had passed and Firefox 3.5 was awake and ready for duty … what’s the cause of this slowness? It’s NSS. What? The Network Security System. It turns out that NSS needs to do all kinds of encryption … Instead of using the randomization functionality of the underlying operating system … they re-invented the wheel … they decided to read the files in all possible temp folders on disk with multiple threads so these files can be used as seeds for the randomization”
People with FF3.5 at work confirm it. It’s astounding that something this crazy made it in.
More to the point, aren’t random numbers the responsibility of the OS? I know that Linux has entropy-based random numbers available (from the TCP stack and other various things IIRC), and even if Windows doesn’t, surely there are better ways of gathering entropy than hitting up one of the slowest IO systems you have.
Apparently they pre-load all the fonts on your system too… :s
For those of you who use Google Reader
.entry-likers {
display: none;
}
In your favourite user CSS changer plugin / feature thing.