Nithin Kamath's Weblog

I have been using Firefox for as long as I can remember, but lately I had been facing a issue of Firefox taking around 5-10 seconds to exit when I closed it. I had been lazy to look up and resolve this issue, but today I finally got down to it.

After searching and reading lots of sites, wherein most of them pointed to some issue with the extensions. So one option was to disable all the extensions and enable them one by one and test to see which one was causing the problem. But this would take a lot of time. And most of the sites had users who mentioned the extensions they were using and they had tested them, so all the extensions I use were listed there. So I was pretty much sure extensions were not an issue.

Then on one site it was mentioned that this could be caused by a plugin like Flash. This is when I noticed that I had only a couple of plugins and I could test them in one go. So I disabled the Picasa plugin which I do not use much and restarted Firefox. Then closed it. Poof! It was gone immediately.

To confirm I open Firefox again, loaded a few pages closed some of them and exited Firefox again. Again, Poof! Immediately closed. So the slow exit was caused by the Picasa plugin which I was using. So much for the issues, one small plugin can cause so much slowdown in shutdown of an application. Looking forward to the next release of Firefox viz., 3.6. Hear it is a lot faster. Happy Browsing till then.

Picasa3 for Linux is a good option for managing photos and for uploading photos to Picasa webalbums, but I am having problems with downloading the Albums using Picasa3, it generally downloads a couple of images from the album and then does not proceed. Even trying to close the download process hangs whole of Picasa and I have to kill the process to continue.

So I found a cool Add-on for Firefox called ‘DownThemAll!‘, it is basically a download manager which manages your downloads. You can follow the below mentioned steps to download Picasa webalbums using this plugin.

• Goto the photo album main page using either the public or the private link.
• Click on the RSS feed icon on the address bar.
• Once the RSS feed is loaded in Firefox, right click anywhere on the page and choose the ‘DownThemAll’ option and select the files you would like to download and where you would like to download them to.
• DownThemAll will do the rest of the work.

If you know of any better way of downloading the web albums let me know through the comments. Till then have a easy way out while downloading ablums from Picasa webalbums in Linux.