Art said:
I had a similar problem with Firefox. Anything Flash would stall. If I
hovered over the picture, it would start playing. But if I stopped
moving the cursor, it would again stall. I went crazy trying different
things, including different versions of Adobe Flash and non-Adobe Flash
programs. I googled the problem and it seemed a few others had similar
problems, but really didn't get anywhere. Finally, it just went away!
Don't know how or why. I think there was some combination of options
that were incompatible and either Adobe or Firefox fixed it either
intentionally or non-intentionally. I know this probably won't help
your problem, but who knows, maybe it will spark something.
If you look at this bug report, performance issues are a recurring problem
as they make changes to Firefox. In one report down near the end of the
thread, it's a plugin that is causing it.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490122
One interesting thing there, is Firefox has a built-in profiler,
and the information from it can be used (by developers) to debug
problems. (Building Firefox for yourself is possible, but it is a
lot of work. I've only done it once, and it took two long days
of work to complete it, and around 2GB of downloads for the tools.
At the time, I was building for usage in Win2K. So getting access
to the Profiler, for fun, would take some work.)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Performance/Profiling_with_the_Built-in_Profiler
I don't think this is Bobb's problem. The circles thing is related
to plugins or the site, rather than Firefox. I've seen it once,
but it seemed to be related to FlashBlock, and the particular
web site not liking the fact I was using FlashBlock (i.e. web site
designed to malfunction, if it "meets resistance" when placing
adverts). I mean, the "circles animation" still running, says
it isn't a stall or anything.
Paul