Firefox yarg snarl snap yarg

[theoldwolf]

What the hqiz causes this?



I've visited every forum I can find out there - most people come back with the dumbass "It's your system" answer, but I've seen so many iterations of this problem, as well as the 30-40 second launch time, that I know it's a bug.

And it frosts my chops, because Firefox has so many good features that I keep using it.

I don't expect an answer... just frustrated when my system slows down to a crawl and FF is slurping up most of my cycles, just sitting there doing nothing.

Comments

[carlfoxmarten]

Yeah, and ~10-15 seconds to quit.

I had this exact problem with Firefox 3.0, so I switched to Google Chrome.
(I'm pretty happy with it, but there's these crazy ad sites that redirect you to bad places, claiming to be anti spyware or adware tools)

Today I told Firefox to give me a new profile (by renaming profiles.ini to something else, you should be able to find it in C:\Users and settings\(username)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\) and it loaded much faster, but with none of my extensions or themes.
(to get your original profile back, rename the new profiles.ini to something else and rename the old one back)

[ccdesan.livejournal.com]

I've been told this works - I don't want to lose my addons, but it might be worth a try to see if that's part of the problem. Thanks much.

[sleepyjohn00.livejournal.com]

Another likely culprit: ads and such with Flash imagery. Even if you're not viewing that panel, the system has to keep running the image, which sucks up CPU.

[ccdesan.livejournal.com]

This is also a good suggestion. With these in hand I may actually be able to track downt the problem, but I'm going to wait until after my clean re-install, just to eliminate other potential variables.

[sleepyjohn00.livejournal.com]

Try this:

Log out, or reboot, to clear all apps.

Login.

Pop open Activity Monitor or Task Manager or whatever your system uses.

Open Firefox.

Start going through the sites you normally visit. Watch the monitor for 30 seconds after each one loads. Credits to crullers that you will see CPU usage climb, and not go down, when you get to a social networking site like Facebook, or an email site like Google, where the browser is frequently polling the servers for updates.

Facebook brought Firefox's CPU load from 6% to 50% and kept it in that area whether I was doing anything or not.

YMMV.

[ccdesan.livejournal.com]

I'll try this and see what happens...

[stevenroy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think the most likely culprit is an add-on that's either really buggy, or just not fully compatible with current Firefox versions... yet.

For example, I know of one person who had several problems with Firefox. It turns out that she had a new version of Skype (she needed one compatible with Windows 7), which added an addon to Firefox that screwed it up. After disabling that particular addon, it all worked again.

Later, one of my RL friends had a similar problem with IE. Same cause, same fix!

So, if you've ever used Skype, my advice is to check your browser for the Skype addon and disable it if it's present.

[ccdesan.livejournal.com]

No Skype addon, but a good thought.

[carlfoxmarten]

It's actually a good thought, if you disable all your extensions, then restart, and see how fast it runs, then enable one extension after another, restarting after each (at lot of time, I know) and see which extension is the culprit.

[marmoe.livejournal.com]

I think I've got more suspects to offer.

1) Empty your TEMP directory of unneeded files, see your %TEMP% system variable for the proper location. Try not to pull the rug from beneath running applications. ;-) Firefox uses these files at start-up for entropy-generation for later encryption, IIRC.

2) Clear cache and browsing history. While being a valuable help, these are kept track of in some sqlite data bases, which can grow to several MBs size.

3) Try and not overdo your bookmarks, maybe transfer some of them to a dedicated file.

[ccdesan.livejournal.com]

Valuable input, thanks for taking the time. My bookmark file is huge.