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Yup! I’ve tried it, but experiment has failed! It seems that installing 300 plugins in Mozilla Firefox causes a real mess to the poor software! The idea has come from Splasho (100 plugins) and CyberNotes (200 plugins). When I’ve read that, I immediately thought : Why not try to install 300? Read more about the experiment!

First, let’s talk about my machine: I’ve tried this on a AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2.09 Ghz) with 1 GB of RAM. SO was Windows XP.

What I’ve done: I went here, browsed randomly and installed 300 plugins at once (I’ve reloaded firefox only at the end). Things were smooth’till I’ve reached 200 plugins. After that, every time I installed a new .xpi, there was an increasing delay (I had to wait 30 seconds when I installed the 300th one, just to see it inserted in the list).

Then, I’ve closed Firefox and rebooted the PC. When the system was ready, I’ve closed all unnecessary software to make things easier.

1st try

The first time i opened Firefox, things went smoothly until some obscure alert windows began to pop up recursively. I just clicked OK … but at last firefox.exe process appeared deadlocked. After 3 min and 28 seconds It was still there, but no more CPU activity and RAM allocation didn’t grow anymore (91.928 Kb). I decided to kill the process. However, some plugins got effectively installed (as they came up with their configuration window)

2nd try

After the process killing, I’ve tried again. Same problem arose. This time it seemed that problem was related to Adblock Filterset.G Updater extension, as the error came up with this plugin’s configuration window.

After I clicked on the Alert window, I got the same “recursive” obscure alert boxes as before, and finally program hanged (100% CPU and unresponsive alert boxes). I killed him again

Before trying again, I’ve decided to remove the Adblock Filterset.G Updater extension that seemed to cause the problem. To do this, I just started Firefox in safe mode (by calling firefox.exe -safe-mode ) and removed it. But that was not the cause!

3nd try

I’ve tried again, without the Adblock Filterset.G Updater extension. But the infamous Alert window (the File not Found Inputstream error) came up again. And Firefox hanged again. I decided to give up

Conclusions

Well, I think it’s not really a Firefox problem. Probably, there is some extension that had a bad exception management (it doesn’t handle properly the file not found event). But … how I can isolate the bad extension over 300 of them? This would require some debugging and tracking, but I don’t have the time to do this! It’s a fun experiment… not a work! I’d liked to include a list of the extensions I was installing (by using ListZilla plugin), but I can only load Firefox in safe mode and the extensions are disabled. I can just include a screenshot of my extension list window: just look at the scrollbar! That’s just crazy

I bet someone will finally load more than 200 plugins in Firefox. This is not the day ^_^
If someone has some advices about this, just leave them in the comments!