Firefox (version .9) freezing problems

January 15, 2005 3:04 PM

FirefoxFilter: My Firefox freezes continually. Any remedies/notions on where I could download 0.9? [MI]

I'd been using FF 0.9 for a year or so, and after I upgraded to 1.0, it's been freezing continually, particularly when submitting forms or just viewing lots of images. I've followed all the support advice, gotten an entirely new Firefox installation, gotten a new profile, gotten rid of all extensions. Nothing working. Windows 2000. And it's only Firefox that causes it to freeze, IE is fine.

Anyone in a similar situation? Any remedies? Failing those, anyone know where I can download Firefox 0.9 again?

posted by Count Ziggurat to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Prior releases can be had at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

You might want to check at http://forums.mozillazine.org/ to see if anybody's had this problem.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 3:13 PM on January 15, 2005

I'd check on #firefox first. Never been a problem they couldn't help me with.

What's your Firefox memory usage look like? Reducing my memory cache size has stopped it from ballooning over 100 MiB.
posted by grouse at 3:20 PM on January 15, 2005

FF is using around 18500 K.
(Is that bad?)

I did ask the folk at mozillazine.

They suggested I get a new installation and profile.

Thanks for the link to previous releases, I'll go back to 0.9 if need be.

But any other ideas?
posted by Count Ziggurat at 3:27 PM on January 15, 2005

Count Ziggurat: that's when it first starts up. But try to reproduce the crash behavior. View a big image gallery or something. Then check the memory profile.
posted by grouse at 3:37 PM on January 15, 2005

You could try disabling as many of your extensions as you feel you can; then bring them back one by one until it starts to fail again.

My experience: I had this kind of behavior a lot when still using 1.0pr0. It was nearly impossible to figure out what precipitated the event.

I still get it from time to time in 1.0, but the characteristics are somewhat different. One typical scenario works like this: I'll load some page, and Firefox will either hang or exit with a crash message. If I restart and use history to go back to the same page, exactly the same thing will happen. If I restart, exit, start again, then go back to the offending page, it would load normally without crashing.

Firefox is a weird beast sometimes. If it weren't for the extensions, I'd use Mozilla instead. Which is one option, incidentally: If you're not using any extensions that aren't included in Mozilla, then try Mozilla 1.7.5. It's solid as a rock, in my experience. Memory footprint is about the same between the two (actually somewhat larger for Firefox in some cases).
posted by lodurr at 3:50 PM on January 15, 2005

I used to constantly get Firefox freezes (usually when loading particular sites -- for example, Monkeyfilter often did it, Metafilter never did). Turns out it had something to do with the bazillion fonts I had installed. Remove fonts, no more problems.
posted by neckro23 at 3:55 PM on January 15, 2005

Here is a question for you: before installing 1.0, did you COMPLETELY remove all earlier versions from your system? Installing 1.0 on top of earlier version(s) is known to cause instability.
posted by killdevil at 4:16 PM on January 15, 2005

1.0 is extremely stable. 1.0PR wasn't. .9 was extremely stable too.

Switching to another version may not help. If it comes down it it, just export your bookmarks, copy your cookies over, and create a new profile. Browse a bit. See if it helps. If its the profile then stick with the new one and then re-install your plugins and extensions. Later on delete the old profile.
posted by skallas at 5:21 PM on January 15, 2005

Don't downgrade to 0.9 without being aware of the multitude of security holes that might leave you vulnerable. Detailed Changelog with security fixes is here.
posted by aberrant at 6:44 PM on January 15, 2005

Also, the moox optimized builds seem to have fixed the freezing in my case.
posted by aberrant at 6:46 PM on January 15, 2005

Am using a moox build and it seems a fair bit better so far.
Thanks.
posted by Count Ziggurat at 8:53 AM on January 16, 2005