What the hell is wrong with firefox and safari right now ?

November 3, 2009 6:03 AM

What is causing problems with my mac browser firefox/safari ?

I don't exactly know when but my Firefox browser last night just started freaking out on me when I moved to different websites or had two tabs open. Example I went to Pitchfork.com and it loads about half the page then freezes up and shows the 'swirling rainbow loading thing' like its opening a really big and intricate thing when yesterday it was fine. This is also happening when I go on gawker based sites and the comments section is loading. What the hell is wrong today that was fine yesterday ?

PS. I switched over to Safari and it did the same thing.


Info:
PowerPC g5
512 MB DDR SDRAM

Firefox:
3.5.4

posted by carefulmonkey to computers & internet (8 comments total)

If it's affecting both Firefox and Safari, I'd say it's probably more of a system issue. I'd recommend running YASU, which will run some maintenance scripts and reboot.
posted by sharkfu at 6:13 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]

Open up Activity Monitor and check your resource load. If you've got any processes eating up all your RAM, you might not see any effects until a browser's JavaScript engine is called to handle some reasonably elaborate task like a fancy commenting system. If this is the case you'll need to kill the offending process(es) and probably reboot. And think about upgrading your system hardware.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 6:28 AM on November 3

Repair Permissions (in Disk Utility)

Reinstall Flash
posted by mkultra at 8:10 AM on November 3

This happens to my mac with Firefox as well, but I Haven't found a great solution yet.

Usually I'll save my current session and restart Firefox.
posted by o0dano0o at 8:51 AM on November 3

Wanted to second sharkfu's answer above: I have been having the same problems as the OP with Safari and FF on my g5. I just ran YASU and happy fast browsing has been restored.

YASU will prompt a restart and your mac will take a looong time to come back up during that first restart, nearly 5 minutes at the gray startup screen. Be patient and wait for it to do its thing.
posted by jamaro at 9:53 AM on November 3

Also, for those of you still rocking the PowerPC G5s-- there are builds of Firefox optimized for PowerPC here. I don't have a G5 so I don't know if they actually provide a performance boost. (I'd try them out before replacing the Firefox in your applications folder. Even then I'd probably rename it to FirefoxPPC so it doesn't overwrite the original.)
posted by sharkfu at 10:47 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]

You have very little RAM, so the system easily starts swapping a lot, which will kill performance. Try opening /Applications/Utilities/ActivityMonitor and see if the cpu usage is high when it shows the rainbow cursor, or if disk activity is high. Browsers easily use a lot of memory when visiting pages with many images.
posted by flif at 12:15 PM on November 3

Vasu cleared it up. Thanks for the help!!
posted by carefulmonkey at 3:36 PM on November 3