{"id":1768,"date":"2012-02-17T11:34:12","date_gmt":"2012-02-17T00:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/?p=1768"},"modified":"2012-02-17T11:34:12","modified_gmt":"2012-02-17T00:34:12","slug":"the-mcafee-site-advisor-add-on-has-an-appalling-memory-leak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/2012\/02\/17\/the-mcafee-site-advisor-add-on-has-an-appalling-memory-leak\/","title":{"rendered":"The McAfee Site Advisor add-on has an appalling memory leak"},"content":{"rendered":"

TL;DR: If you have the McAfee Site Advisor add-on installed in your Firefox, I recommend you disable it immediately because it has an appalling memory leak.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wrote yesterday<\/a> about a reader’s results with the McAfee Site Advisor 3.4.1<\/a> and McAfee ScriptScan 14.4.1 add-ons for Firefox — he was finding that they greatly increased Firefox’s memory consumption.<\/p>\n

This morning I tested Site Advisor 3.4.1 myself, and found that, when enabled, it leaks every single content compartment that is created<\/a>.\u00a0 In other words, most of the JavaScript memory used for any page opened with Firefox is never reclaimed.\u00a0 In terms of memory consumption, this is pretty much the worst possible behaviour for an add-on.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0 This excessive memory consumption is likely to cause Firefox to run much more slowly and crash much more often.
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In the bug report I recommended that we block-list it immediately and contact McAfee, but Jorge Villalobos told me that block-listing is considered an option of last resort.\u00a0 Three McAfee people have been CC’d on the bug and I’ve been told that some other Mozilla people are contacting McAfee via other channels. Hopefully we’ll see concrete action soon.<\/p>\n

If anyone else can replicate my results, particularly for older versions of Site Advisor, that would be useful to know.\u00a0 Steps to reproduce are in the bug report.<\/p>\n

As for ScriptScan 14.4.1, I haven’t tried it myself because I haven’t been able to find where to download it from.\u00a0 My searching just turned up lots of references, such as this one<\/a>, to when Mozilla block-listed version 14.4.0<\/a> because it was crashing so frequently.\u00a0 (Site Advisor 3.4.0 was block-listed at the same time.\u00a0 And SiteAdvisor 3.3.1 was also block-listed<\/a> due to crashes!)\u00a0 If anyone can tell me where to get ScriptScan from that would be very helpful.<\/p>\n

If you have any McAfee add-ons installed in your Firefox, I strongly recommending disabling them immediately.\u00a0 McAfee clearly has a poor record when it comes to the quality of their Firefox add-ons.\u00a0 I also personally found Site Advisor to be an extremely annoying and unhelpful add-on.\u00a0 I’m no expert on Windows security but if you are looking for alternatives I have heard numerous people say that Microsoft Security Essentials<\/a> is the best anti-virus\/security system for Windows — it’s reputedly very effective, and is free of charge and non-intrusive.\u00a0 It also doesn’t install any add-ons into Firefox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TL;DR: If you have the McAfee Site Advisor add-on installed in your Firefox, I recommend you disable it immediately because it has an appalling memory leak. I wrote yesterday about a reader’s results with the McAfee Site Advisor 3.4.1 and McAfee ScriptScan 14.4.1 add-ons for Firefox — he was finding that they greatly increased Firefox’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,30,4544],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}