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FireFox 3.5 is slow and leaky for me

S

SoftwareEng

Senior member
FireFox 3.5 is very slow on my 1.6 Ghz PC with 1 GB of RAM.

Opening a new window takes a second; having a few tabs open on just plain pages like CNN or this site causes 10-20% spikes, while other pages make it go up to 50-80% until FireFox is restarted.

Lastly, they couldn't realize that if I _right-click_ something, I'll want to press the accelerator key with my LEFT hand, so "Save Link As" is not as convenient as IE's "Save Link As

Also, if I use it for a couple of days without closing, memory usage goes up to ~ 450 MB with just Craigslist and another text tab open. It keeps leaking. Version 3.5.1 didn't fix this.

So it's far from ideal for an older PC without gigs of RAM, and I confirmed the leak on many PCs now.

** New issue: caching problem. A bookmarked Craigslist search brings back old results. Click the Search button on the site - get new results.
 
3.5 sucks. I had to hand in my firefox fanboy card recently. Too many bugs. Back to ie8 unfortunately. Maybe Ill try chrome again.
 
code doesn't selectively leak like that😛 what addons do you have.
firefox is snappy for desktops. it doesn't rapidly page out ram usage so yes, if you have dozens or say a hundred tabs open its going to eat a large chunk of ram. however it does it well for desktops, giving you fast access to any tab you click on since its still in ram. chrome and other ram stingy browsers get rather slow once you load up a lot of tabs, since many aren't in ram anymore esp if you multitask.
as far as i can tell firefox 3.5 uses no more ram than the older versions. and i leave tabs open for days as well.
 
i just switched to firefox 3.5.1 from IE8 and must say i am impressed by it. also you are blaming firefox for slowing a 1.6ghz with 1gb of ram?? 🙂 i think the computer is to blame there
 
Same here. When I scroll a long forum window it feels somewhat laggy. I don't know what's up with it..
 
My firefox is slow too and eat too much memory (up to 1 gb!!!). I thought it might be a virus but I already scanned my computer and found nothing. I need help!!
 
I was giving Firefox the benefit of the doubt waiting for 3.5. They've failed. I'm a 100% Chrome user now.
 
For most of my browsing, I use Maxthon 2.15. The UI in Firefox never appealed to me at all. If I do want to use something gecko-based, it used to be the K-Meleon browser. Now my favorite gecko-based browser is Orca. I like that it has the Maxthon/Avant look. Plus, Orca can use many (not all) of the Firefox extensions. They update it so Orca uses the same engine as the latest Firefox. My guess is that Orca and Firefox would use the same amount of memory, but I have never tested it to know one way or the other.
 
Whoever is saying that 1.6 GHz is too slow for web browsing is out of his mind 🙂 Remmeber times when awesome 3d games ran on 600 Mhz?? Now all of a sudden 1.6 GHz isn't enough to scroll through long forums or browse the news?

It's an f'ing conspiracy by Microsoft and Netscape and Intel to get us to keep upgrading.
 
Absolutely terrible!

I'm using Firefox at work on an HP 2510p Core 2 Duo ULV 1.6Ghz with 2gb RAM. No matter what I do, it gets unbearably slow after an hour or 2. Using Safari, IE6 (Yes, still IE 6 on XP) and Chrome poses no problems.

At home, it's an iMac 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4gb RAM... Same case. 1 Window about 6-7 tabs. Times I have to transfer the URLs one by one slowly from FF to Safari and then restart FF to start afresh. Downgrading to 3.0.x solved this problem.

I've warned my wife (on Windows Vista) not to upgrade to FF 3.5 and she's still happy with FF 3.0.12.
 
I've had several instances where Firefox 3.5.1 locks up and goes to 100% CPU usage. Sometime's, I'm lucky enough that Taskmanager can EVENTUALLY close it. Other times, it's so hung that all I can do is power down and reboot.

This isn't an isolated case.

The only addons showing are Java Quick Starter 1.0 and Tab Killer 2.0. I freaking HATE tabbed browsing.

I'm glad they finally built in the ability to turn off their Awful Bar. Another gripe is that graphics that are smooth in other browsers are slow loading and jerky in FF.

I still use Netscape 7.2 as much as possible. Unfortunately, it crashes on too many sites, but where it works (like on these forums 😀 ), it's smoother and displays better than anything else.
 
Originally posted by: Harvey


This isn't an isolated case.
Click to expand...

Not saying it's the culprit, but FLASH was mentioned in the 2nd item from that search. Flash seems to be the fuckup of all fucked up software in the world....across any platform and browser.

I'm running 3.5.1 with Adblock Plus and another addon (adds the navigational click sound to pages, I like that) and have had no issues (other than the occasional clicking <refresh> to get a page to load but had to do that with i.e. also).
 
Originally posted by: Engineer

Not saying it's the culprit, but FLASH was mentioned in the 2nd item from that search. Flash seems to be the fuckup of all fucked up software in the world....across any platform and browser.

I'm running 3.5.1 with Adblock Plus and another addon (adds the navigational click sound to pages, I like that) and have had no issues (other than the occasional clicking <refresh> to get a page to load but had to do that with i.e. also).
Click to expand...

True, but the current version of Flash has been out for awhile, and Mozilla had it in their hands to test long before they released with 3.5 and 3.5.1. Like it or not, they know Flash is all over the place. They have no excuse for such failure.

They also screwed the pooch on Real Player's Browser Record plug in. Not only does it fail, but if you have it installed when you install ver. 3.5.1 over ver. 3.0x, you can't remove it from the plug in window without editing your registry.

AFIC, Mozilla has gone from the premier browser to the gang that couldn't boot straight. :roll:
 
Any fix for this? I'm kind of lazy to roll back so I'm putting up with it for now, hopefully they'll fix it soon.
 
Originally posted by: Barfo

Any fix for this? I'm kind of lazy to roll back so I'm putting up with it for now, hopefully they'll fix it soon.
Click to expand...

Rolling it back to ver. 3.0x won't help. The hanging and CPU usage were just as bad, and it was even slower when it was allegedly working. 😛
 
So even though everyone claims to hate IE, it's the smoothest, easiest to use browser of all 🙂 It just feels right. No weird CPU spikes, no jumpy scrolling, and good shortcuts.

(I'm talking about IE 6)
 
Originally posted by: Harvey
Originally posted by: Barfo

Any fix for this? I'm kind of lazy to roll back so I'm putting up with it for now, hopefully they'll fix it soon.
Click to expand...

Rolling it back to ver. 3.0x won't help. The hanging and CPU usage were just as bad, and it was even slower when it was allegedly working. 😛
Click to expand...

It was better for me with 3.0x, I hadn't even noticed any slowdowns until now.
 

I loved Firefox 2. Then I upgraded to Firefox 3 a couple months ago and said, "eh, it's OK but not as good as FF2 was in its prime". Now that I've upgraded to FF 3.5 I am very disappointed. The browser seems to freeze up and I lose control of it whenever it encounters a downed website and IMHO FF 3.0+ just didn't feel as zippy as FF2.

It's been all downhill since the last FF2 update. I am sorry to see that Firefox's speed and quality are heading south. I'm almost reminded of a company that used to produce an excellent product until it grew too big and began compromising on quality and features.
 
i loved FF2 also but when 3 and 3.5 came out, the speed increase is very noticeable. I used to get crashes semi regularly in FF2 but now i rarely ever do.
maybe you have to reformat or something, because even on slower systems i install it on, it is still pretty fast and doesn't have too many issues.
 
Tried to print the instructions from MS on how to switch to AHCI on Vista the other day and had to switch from Firefox to IE8 to get it to print.
 
Originally posted by: SoftwareEng
So even though everyone claims to hate IE, it's the smoothest, easiest to use browser of all 🙂 It just feels right. No weird CPU spikes, no jumpy scrolling, and good shortcuts.

(I'm talking about IE 6)
Click to expand...

IE8's slow as hell for me, 7 ran pretty well though. I'm happy enough with FF3.5, but I get some minor hitching also. It's faster than 3.0 in general, but I get the page scroll stutters too.
 
Loaded ff 3.51 on xp a couple of days ago with adblock, flagfox and stumbleupon. When I bring up 'topic tools/subscribe' to unsubscribe from a thread in atforums, the pc will 'hang'. It will eventually come back in 5-10 minutes. This didn't happen in ff 2.x.

Also, with page size in atforums set to 100, around post 60-70, things get corrupted. This has been a problem since 2.x and is one of the reasons I don't usually use ff. If it can't do this simple thing, what else does it fail at...

chrome is surprising attractive. It's curious since I would think that by now all browsers would be pretty much the same but there are likable differences in each. One thing I don't like about chrome is that it screws up yahoo mail screen refresh occasionally.
 
Originally posted by: Chiefcrowe
i loved FF2 also but when 3 and 3.5 came out, the speed increase is very noticeable. I used to get crashes semi regularly in FF2 but now i rarely ever do.
maybe you have to reformat or something, because even on slower systems i install it on, it is still pretty fast and doesn't have too many issues.
Click to expand...

reformat? 🙂 Reformatting and reinstalling your OS won't fix memory leaks and performance problems with a stand-alone application like Firefox
 
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