High CPU load when tab stuck on 'Loading'

[Stephen R Laniel]

I wonder if anyone knows Firefox well enough to explain to
me why the following happens. I've noticed for a while that
if a tab is 'Loading...', Firefox is using 30%-50% of my
CPU. I only just noticed, though, that if I create a new tab
in which there's no activity, the CPU load drops to nothing.

Now, this is similar to the behavior of, say, a command-line
app that's spitting a lot of data to stdout. If I tab away
from that command line app, the CPU load drops to nothing
because the graphics board isn't getting so taxed. What's
the explanation in the case of Firefox? Why should a tab
marked 'Loading...' take up so much of my CPU? What's it
doing?

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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