Deactivating zotero temporarily withouth restarting Firefox

orschiro
Hi there,

Is it possible to temporarily deactivate Zotero without having to restart Firefox?

Background of my question:

I use Zotero Standalone and Firefox as my primary browser on my laptop. On mobile use I do not need to use Zotero but just with Firefox being opened, I noticed that also Zotero is enabled and consumes quite some power.

Information from PowerTop:

782 mW 25.0 ms/s 95.1 Process /usr/lib/zotero/zotero
  • dstillman
    No, it's not possible. Disabling and enabling the extension requires a Firefox restart.

    But just to be clear, Zotero for Firefox wouldn't show up as a separate process, so that would be Zotero Standalone you're seeing in that output*, probably running translator detection for web pages. So you could just quit Standalone, but Zotero for Firefox would then do the same thing and presumably take up the same amount of CPU.

    I suppose a way to enable/disable translator detection might be useful in some cases, but 1) people would probably disable it by accident and think Zotero had stopped working and 2) our goal is really just to make detection as low-impact as possible, so if you're seeing significant CPU usage, we'd want to look into reducing that if possible.

    I've never run powertop, so I'm not familiar with its output. What is the 95.1 there? That's not CPU, is it? If you're seeing regular >90% CPU usage from Zotero while it's in the background, something is very wrong.


    * at least, I assume, though I'm not sure why the executable is in /usr/lib/zotero/
  • orschiro
    > So you could just quit Standalone, but Zotero for Firefox would then do the same thing and presumably take up the same amount of CPU.

    You are right. Indeed, it was Zotero Standalone that for some reasons did not quit successfully and was running as a background process.

    Given that, forget about my request. With Zotero Standalone being successfully terminated, it does not show up as a process in PowerTop anymore.

    > I've never run powertop, so I'm not familiar with its output. What is the 95.1 there?

    Nope, this is not CPU consumption but some other metric that I do not know either. :P

    > * at least, I assume, though I'm not sure why the executable is in /usr/lib/zotero/

    It is packaged as such:

    https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/zo/zotero/PKGBUILD

    Should this be changed?
  • dstillman
    Should this be changed?
    No, never mind — I guess that mirrors what the Firefox packages themselves do (and various other GUI applications that expect their files to be together in one place).
  • orschiro
    Alright. Consider the issue as resolved.

    Thanks!
Sign In or Register to comment.