Google Mail and other sites significantly slower recently
I don't know if this coincided with https-everywhere being updated to 4.0development.10 - in fact I don't remember for sure whether I was on the stable or development branch prior to this - but Google Mail in particular has become a lot slower in the last few days.
In more detail: Extensions: Adblock Plus, Cookie Monster, https-everywhere, NoScript, RequestPolicy, SQLite Manager, Ubuntu Firefox Modifications, View Dependencies, Web Developer (all enabled)
Steps to reproduce:
Check that all of the above extensions are present and enabled.
Navigate to https://mail.google.com. There is quite a long delay before the page has fully loaded.
Temporarily allow google.com to execute scripts and temporarily allow google.com cookies. This leads to a further delay - which I should have timed - but I do know that after temporarily allowing requests from google.com to gstatic.com in RequestPolicy, there is another delay, just as long as the first, before the page is rendered. Most of this is spent "connecting".
There may be further delays in Gmail, but after a while they all seem to be sorted. Possibly these delays are related to the first time each certificate is encountered.
However, if I first disable https-everywhere, there are no such delays.
Navigate to other sites, such as nationalrail.co.uk. These are also noticeably slower in the last few days - unless https-everywhere is disabled. I've had https-everywhere installed for a couple of years now, and I think that things were still fine for a while after the last update on August 16.
Finally, close the browser. I have it set to clear history when Firefox exits, and to clear everything except site preferences, however far back. If https-everywhere is enabled, System Monitor shows the activity resulting from this to take much longer than usual, as if more information is being deleted than would otherwise have been the case.
Does anyone have any idea where the problem might lie, and if there's likely to be a less radical workaround than disabling https-everywhere altogether?