Fixing Firefox

[Merad]

So I've become rather frustrated with Firefox recently, to the point that I've been trying the alternatives the last few weeks. There are things I love about both Opera and Chrome, but they have their own pretty significant shortcomings that make me really not want to use them as a primary browser. So being that my main complaints with Firefox are performance related, I'm hoping the minds here at AT can help me find some improvement.

Really I just have two significant complaints about Firefox....

1. Connection "hangs". FF seems to just do this randomly - it hangs up and refuses to load anything for 2-3 minutes, the page will just sit there saying loading... When it does this I can pop open any other browser and use them with no problem, and I've never experienced a problem like this in either Opera or Chrome, so it's pretty much got to be a browser issue rather than a connection/computer issue.

2. Performance. It sucks, big time. I'm using what I consider basically the bare minimum number of addons (see below), but FF still leaks memory like a sieve. If I use the browser heavily for an hour or 2, or leave it open for more than a day or so, it's using a gig+ of memory and performance is choppy when you scroll pages and so on. Even with a freshly restarted browser, if I try to watch a movie over Netflix on my second monitor while browsing the movie stutters constantly and the window I'm actually browsing in has choppy performance.

This is FF 3.6.12 and the addons I'm running are

Adblock Plus
Download Manager Tweak
Download Helper
Extended Statusbar
IE Tab 2
Organize Status Bar
Screengrab
StumbleUpon
Tab Mix Plus
Xmarks

And plugins for
Foxit Reader
Goggle Earth
IE Tab
Java
Office 2010
WMP
Flash
Silverlight
Winamp

 

[sivart]

Have you tried to disable add-ons / plug-ins one at a time and see if your issues go away. You are blaming the browser but you have programs running within the browser that aren't created by the Mozilla team that you assume are working correctly.

I'm not saying that one of them is the problem, but they need to be eliminated as not causing the problem as a starting point.

I've never seen any of these issues on Windows 7, Windows XP or Ubuntu 10.04 using the latest Firefox release. I also don't leave my browser open for days on end either.

 

[hclarkjr]

try this http://www.crystalidea.com/speedyfox and see if it helps, also try ccleaner and clean out the temporary internet files and cache

 

[Chiefcrowe]

yes good call about disabling plugins one at a time.

Also you may have to just create a new user profiles.. sometimes that will fix the problem.

 

[rgallant]

try this http://www.crystalidea.com/speedyfox and see if it helps, also try ccleaner and clean out the temporary internet files and cache

-thanks that worked for me on the latest beta ,no hang now

 

[kochii02]

this may be a problem related to the cookies. really it required too much time and me too face these type of problems with my browser. will be back here again if there is any solutions....

 

[ankitjain11]

try to clear ff history and temporary internet files.....maybe this can help!

 

[Emulex]

check eventvwr for event 4226

i've been using firefox 4b7 - it's pretty snappy about 50% as fast as chrome9 dev