Firefox issues

I've had something weird on FF at home happen a couple of times. New tabs will just start opening - I mean like a hundred and I have to shut down. I think that's probably definitely a virus.

I am pretty much at my wit's end here -- sometime between when I went home on vacation last Wednesday night and when I came back on Monday, apparently Firefox decided that working on my machine was too much for it beyond ten minutes at a stretch. I'm running 2.0.0.6 on Mac OSX 10.4.10 -- without fail, sometimes almost promptly, it starts choking up and taking forever to load pages, switch between tabs, even respond when clicked on. I've seen the spinning ball far too often and have had to force quit god knows how many times. Regular quitting and machine restarts and more have had no effect, and again, absolutely nothing like this was giving me a problem before vacation and it's been nothing but grief since. A cursory examination of the bug report list mentions a couple of problems that might be mine but I just don't know. Anyone?

Safari.

Considering I switched from Safari a long time back, I'd ask for other suggestions.

Sorry, I just can't understand the love for FireFox. Safari is just so stable and loads a lot quicker than FF for me. Why did you switch anyway?

Have you tried to just reinstall it?

Or empty the cache?

Ned is that not sounding like a connection issue, rather than a browser problem? i guess you've already looked into that eh.

it sounds very similar to a problem i get sometimes, again with firefox, but further checking shows that IE5 produces slow internet pages. It sorts itself out after a day and i usually just put it down to crappy broadband service.

i'm away for the next 5 days and you can bet your bottom dollar that my computer will fail to work on my return, it usually does.

yeh this is happening to a lot of people, i've read that there are problems with displaying flash & memory leakage. some people have had success disabling the antiphishing. have you tried Camino?

you know when you try and download something big on firefox.. it seems to freeze the whole thing (and any other firefox window), while the download is in progress (and not tell you what progress it's making) until it's over.. is there a way to fix that??

Safari is just so stable and loads a lot quicker than FF for me. Why did you switch anyway?

Because I was experiencing the reverse. Cache-clearing so far has had no effect but I'll try it again -- as it is I need to head out to work so I won't have a chance to futz with it further until tonight.

Stet, good point about the connection issue but that doesn't seem to be it.

this is on windows xp

i mean, this is on windows xp xpost

I had this on my Apple as well.

i've got exactly the same OS X/FF combo as you, ned, and i have to say it does grind to a halt every few days or so ... nothing quite as frequent as you're having, though. how many extensions have you got running? have you tried chucking them all?

i really don't like safari at all, i have to say. it seems oddly unresponsive and slow.

can keith not write us a web browser?

actually: checking mine just there, it seems greasemonkey, foxytunes and a couple of others were in some odd limbo-like state (presumably since the 2.0.0.6 update) ... the icons in the add-ons menu were greyed out. hmm. i've uninstalled them because TBH i never use the things.

go on, check you've not got some rogue FF extension fucking shit up.

I'm glad (okay not really glad, but you get my point) to see others having the same issues with Firefox. Within the last two weeks my Firefox has recently started grinding to a near complete halt whenever I'm downloading a file (exact same problem as ken c).

yeah i have that downloading problem all the time, i just thought it was shite programming

hmm: i don't notice everything else grinding to a halt while i'm downloading, but it does do so *before* i download (for up to 20 seconds). like ste, i just thought it was sloppiness.

still prefer it to safari, though. sorry.

I've had problems with FF using up tons of CPU/RAM for no apparent reason lately (on XP), might well be extensions doing it, should try uninstalling and see if it helps.

> you know when you try and download something big on firefox.. it seems to freeze the whole thing (and any other firefox window), while the download is in progress (and not tell you what progress it's making) until it's over.. is there a way to fix that??

is this mostly pdfs? if it is then PDF file association (within firefox) from 'use this plugin' to 'use this application'. now they'll download in background then start acrobat rather than freezing friefox for the duration.

might work with other file types as well.

Since Monday, Firefox crashes every time I try to reply to an email from my gmail account. Why?? I went on vacation for a week and since I got back it's fuxored. IT IS A MYSTERY DOT GEE EYE EFF.

I can't imagine it's any of my extensions, I would have noticed that before my vacation break as well and haven't added any since. Still, I might experiment.

laurel: have had something similar with bad swf files embedded in a page, mostly ads. use adblock to block them. (you might need to view source in a different browser in order to find them)

it's with any kinds of files koogs, and i wasn't even trying to launch them, just to save to disk. the program will just freeze for the duration of the download and then eventually comes back with a little popup on the bottom right corner and say "All files download is complete", and bring up the downloads window.

it's like somebody forgot to run the download process in a background thread.

or maybe it's the way firefox wants to tell me "You decided to download a 15MB file. Good Job. Moron."

i do that all the time (firefox, winxp...) and it's fine.

it's not me, it's you.

modem problems? virus checker? disk space?

there must be SOMETHING, but i dunno what.

disk space maybe but there's definitely more than 15MB.

laurel: http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_thread/thread/01835027fc45a73e/e8eece8a4a569b8b?lnk=raot

someone with same problem since last monday. clearing cache, deleting cookie fixed it.

Andy, you are a star. Thank you.

Ned: maybe try safe mode (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode#Mac_OS_X) and if that fixes things then start turning extensions on and off one at a time. Failing that, create a new OS X test user account and see if they have the same problem.

How dare you be sensible. I wanted to do something like reach into the computer and strangle the program.

You know what always breaks Firefox for me? The, um, All Music Guide.

Failing that, create a new OS X test user account and see if they have the same problem.

Before you resort to this, it might be worth quitting Firefox, moving ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox to, e.g. the Desktop, thus forcing Firefox to create a new profile the next time you launch it. If this fixes the problems then you're sorted. [If you want to restore your bookmarks, quit FF, find bookmarks.html in the old Firefox folder which is now on your Desktop and copy it to the same place in the new ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox folder, and restart.]

I was having system-wide slowness issues, Firefox downloads, Photoshop, you name it -- I finally just moved up getting my new system by eight months.

Ned, run Activity Monitor and see if there are any unidentified processes that are eating up CPU. Do you use a CPU monitor widget?

caek's advice is good.

Everyone, you have to remember to *think* in RUSSIAN.

Hahahaha

How often did I see that film on HBO in the early eighties? Oh, quite a few times...

2.0.0.6 for OS X is hopeless. fucking thing just hung on me trying to open a new tab ... wouldn't mind so much if i hadn't also been 95% through a 100+MB download. "restore session" doesn't restore the download ... i mean, come on, i used to have stuff on fucking OS9 that could resume a broken download. how come shitfox can't manage?

i'm going to hold out for the next update and see if it gets any better. if not, i'll go back to safari, which is also shit, but not *quite* as crash-happy.

I've just gone back to Safari and spent an hour or two researching and installing things that make it work in a way that means I won't miss Opera (Safari Stand for customisable keyword-led searching from the URL bar -- fuck using a fiddly drop-down menu. xGestures for letting me use mouse gestures to go back and forth between pages).

The one thing that really made me switch from Opera was the inability to submit from Scrabulous's messaging box. Funny the things browser choices hinge on.

I'm sure more people would use Opera if its default appearance weren't so fugly.

i've become pretty addicted to inquisitor for quick searches - http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari

Slack and facebook are the biggest memory hogs. Just closing a tab w/ slack or fb in Firefox instantly drops my overall memory usage w/ 15%, according to my memory cleaner app

Desktop Firefox is going thru a shonky phase at the moment imo

The Android version is currently dogshit, as others have indicated

in Mozilla's slight defense, the Android version now has a back button and a download manager, but the other issues haven't been resolved (including the lack of a tab bar) and the whole thing still feels like a beta. apparently the latest version of Nightly supports add-ons, but I haven't tried it yet and I'm still using Kiwi for the time being even though it's no longer being updated

something i complained about here (back button being disabled when clicking on image urls) is explained here:

https://support.mozilla.org/gl/questions/1254496

instagram and facebook now open in a container in firefox and that ditches all the history / referer details when making the new container. makes sense but i wonder whether i can force it to use a new tab for those links so i still have everything in the original tab.

firefox has been at the crayons again, changing stuff, making it look dumber.

top bar with the tabs in it now looks a lot taller but the favicons and tab names are the same size so you lose vertical space for no real gain.

yeah that spacing ffs. I had to create a lot more bookmark folders because eff having to scroll to see my bookmark lists

it's annoying

had to change that this morning. wordy fix below

about:config <-- in address bar. "accept risk and continue"
browser.compactmode.show <--- set to true. exit about:config. maybe restart firefox.

find 'customize' under 'more tools' in the drop down menu that is an icon that looks like 3 small horizontal lines

set density to compact.

protip-- if you use menu bar and bookmarks toolbar, drag the bookmark toolbar items onto the menu bar from the customize screen

oops! one more important step-- turn off the bookmarks toolbar if you move the bookmark toolbar items up to the menu bar or never use it.

hmm, didn't seem to change anything. Although my Density setting was "Compact (not supported)".

try turning off your bookmarks toolbar

ah but it's the bookmarks toolbar i want the compact to affect. Is that not possible to change then?

i can't confirm it myself because i'm running ESR but apparently setting browser.proton.enabled to false in about:config unfucks things a bit

enjoy it until mozilla inevitably removes it next version

There is also browser.uidensity that should be set to 1 (if it isn't already)

xp, chih, tried it and things got even more compact :)

I think Ste meant the Bookmarks dropdown menu from the menubar was no longer compact. I decided to test disabling all Proton entries in about:config and discovered the one that fixes the issue by resetting to how it was before.

set to false:
browser.proton.contextmenus.enabled

and while were at it we might as well set the entry chihuahuau mentioned to false as well:
browser.proton.enabled

i dunno if this is new but i'm forever closing tabs i don't want to close.

the visible tab is highlighted in a lighter colour than usual, the tab the mouse is over is highlighted using a darker colour than usual. it's easy to glance up, see a highlighted tab and hit middle button to close it without registering it was the wrong kind of highlight.

Update (developer edition, at least) moves the back/forward buttons to the right, reversing them and pointing at each other? Like so:

-> <-

Just updated the non-dev version on my computer and that hasn't happened.

lol that has to be a bug rather than a UX decision. can you right click on the toolbar and choose 'Customize Toolbar' to drag them to the right place?

ah, yes. thanks! change was just completely counterintuitive.

if they just changed from left aligning icons A B C to right aligning icons C B A then that would explain it, keeping the outermost icon outermost.

what even is an ai browser?

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/mozilla-says-firefox-will-evolve-into-an-ai-browser-and-nobody-is-happy-about-it-ive-never-seen-a-company-so-astoundingly-out-of-touch

i've been using waterfox on my laptop at home and it seems fine, i just have to remember to click on the blue icon rather than the orangey one that i've used for years.

I highly recommend Vivaldi browser:

Vivaldi
https://vivaldi.com

Private
Privacy isn’t just a feature at Vivaldi, it’s a philosophy. No profiling, no data mining, no-nonsense. With built-in ad and tracker blockers, plus end-to-end encryption for synced data.

it won't tell me (easily) if it's even available as a linux download, it just assumes i want the apple version because that's what i'm currently using.

(oh, it uses gtk so that should be fine)

(found it)

trying Vivaldi & I like it! Thanks for the endorsement :-)

Vivaldi is available on Android, Windows and iOS.

been such a long time Firefox loyalist, this is depressing

it really is

“A.I.” browsers: the price of admission is too high
https://vivaldi.com/blog/a-i-browsers-the-price-of-admission-is-too-high/

And this is why Vivaldi takes a stand: we’re keeping browsing human.

Mozilla now says there will be a AI kill switch in early 2026
https://www.techradar.com/computing/firefox-responds-to-ai-backlash-by-promising-a-kill-switch-for-turning-off-controversial-new-features

FYI, the Waterfox fork of Firefox is AI free: https://www.waterfox.com
https://www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-here-response-to-mozilla/

ayyyyyy, they got built-in tree-style tabs, nice. will definitely consider.

Couldn't get my head around Vilvadi and the 'built in' ad blocker didn't work.

Will look at waterfox

vivaldi ffs

I gave Vivaldi a go but didn't look into the built-in adblocking yet... ublock origin can be added for that, which is what i use on firefox.

I've been using both Vivaldi and Firefox for some months now with minimal issues. The one thing however that's very frustrating about Vivaldi is how difficult it is to recover your tabs if you accidentally close out of the browser window. Accessing the history in general on Vivaldi is really annoying

looking around it sounds like I'm not the first person to notice this or complain about this

xp *Vivaldi and Waterfox