After a recent post mentioning a freezing os / browser crash while using Whonix I decided to see what Kicksecure was all about. I didn’t realize that Whonix was a hardned version of Debian I thought it was just Debian + Tor Browser + isolated Gateway.
The first few times opening Kicksecure the cpu spiked and o/s froze and I needed to kill it. A few more times and I realized it was the opening of Secbrowser that was the culprit for driving the cpu (Tor Browser v 10 strikes again.)
For a variety of reasons I have decided to make a slow transition from Debian Xfce to Kicksecure. One of the first things I did was install Tor Browser v 10 since that has been my daily browser since v 10 came out a few months ago although not intentionally. I used to use a de-Torrified version of the Tor browser something equivelant to Secbrowser before I knew Secbrowser existed; just the TBB with the proxy adjustments and environmrntal variable added gave a clearnet Tor browser which worked great. That was until v 10 was released. What I found was that the de-Torrified v 10 would run constant cpu up in the 90% + scale making it unusable. So I made TBB my daily driver and I jump over to Ungoogled Chromium for times I need clearnet access.
What’s this have to do with Kicksecure? Because right now the same exact issue is happening with Secbrowser as with my de-Torrifed v10 browser since they are one in the same. Kicksecure is running great 1 cpu alllocated running 5% < and 3GB ram allocated running aroud 50%. Open Secbrowser and cpu pegs at 100% and memory hits around 70%. Seems clear v 10 TBB is the issue when the proxy is disabled. In addition when I shut down Secbrowser it is throwing codes see below. One other item I am not sure I have seen anyone mention is with the release of v 10 TBB - when you close the browser it hangs for around a minute. This can be seen in the task manager you wont be able to reopen right away until it fully shuts down. I have never expierenced this with previous versions and not sure if it plays into the Secbrowser exorbitant cpu usage.
