A few days ago (September 25) Lightbeam received another update. In the previous version the small icons of freshly visited websites were not saved reliable anymore. To improve the efficiency I decided not to listen to all signals of Firefox (when the information about the tabs changed) but in the end it was a little too much reduction. Hopefully I found the sweet spot with version 3.4.9.

The next problem was part of the add-on for a longer time: After a reset of the recorded data the nodes of the first new websites were not drawn automatically. You had to switch to a different mode (e.g. from the normal to the fuse mode) to force Lightbeam to draw the nodes or you could reload the tab of Lightbeam. This problem is gone with this update.

Next step: Give it a boost!

A long existing issue with the extension is that it does not work well with a large amount of date. If you recorded lots of websites and it tries to draw the nodes it probably takes a long time or it might crash as well. One reason for the weak performance are the little icons inside the nodes. The browser needs much time to prepare them because of how Lightbeam works right now. Also, the add-on has a high consumption of the memory of your computer.

In the past I tried already a few things that did not work well but last month I tested another approach and it looks very promising and reduces the memory load a lot! However, the new approach needs more testing to prevent any further issues with the icons. I hope that I will be able to publish another version this year which contains the performance boost so it will be much nicer to use Lightbeam.

Until then please report if you have any problems with Lightbeam or share your ideas with me. Write me an email or create an issue on Codeberg and I will try to improve the add-on for you.