Help with firefox lagging/freezing???

April 3, 2008 9:31 AM

Can anyone help me figure out why Firefox is freezing/lagging on me and help me to fix it?

Firefox all of a sudden started freezing while loading tabs. It does it when I'm either opening one or multiple tabs and it won't load them from anywhere from 30seconds to 3-5 minutes, so it's really putting a hamper on my productivity. It started a couple weeks ago, but have had exams so haven't been able to really try to fix it yet, and it happens more often when I'm trying to load pictures or lists, especially in ebay and facebook.
I've not installed any extensions that would be doing it, and if I had, I deleted them (didn't really use them like I thought I would, so got rid of them).
Oh, it's not the internet, as IE and Opera work just fine during these periods of lag for firefox.

Can anyone help me before I go insane anymore??? (with FF that is).

posted by uncballzer to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Have you tried just reinstalling FF? I've had a few minor but irritating problems over the years with FF and reinstalling worked every time.
posted by iconomy at 9:38 AM on April 3, 2008

Response by poster: Oh, yeah, meant to mention that. I did a complete uninstall and reinstall.
posted by uncballzer at 9:40 AM on April 3, 2008

We're only a few weeks from the official launch of FF3 - maybe grab the beta5 release and try that? I know it doesn't actually 'solve' the problem, but maybe you don't have to.
posted by pupdog at 9:49 AM on April 3, 2008

Response by poster: @ pupdog: I tried FF3, but only one of my extensions work in FF3, so it's not for me yet, as I use the addon's extensively. Thanks for the suggestion though! (although will be looking forward to FF3 when my extensions get uptodate.)
posted by uncballzer at 10:06 AM on April 3, 2008

1. Disable your extensions
2. Problem gone?
3. Enable extensions one at a time.
4. Problem back?
5. Stop using that one extension.

This is the case with at least half of FF problems in my company.

Also, as stated above, FF3 is a major, major improvement, get on it as soon as you can do what you need to with it.
posted by Cosine at 10:25 AM on April 3, 2008

I've been having the same issue lately on XP. If I recall correctly, Firefox recently pushed a browser upgrade. I'm thinking that it's something buggy with that. For whatever reason, it's seemed to have calmed down today.
posted by finitejest at 10:26 AM on April 3, 2008

Lifehacker has info on workarounds for getting your extensions to work in Firefox 3.

I haven't tried yet - I'll wait till June for the full release.
posted by doorsfan at 10:29 AM on April 3, 2008

I've found AJAXy stuff to bring FF to a grinding halt. Do you use any RSS readers?
posted by rhizome at 10:42 AM on April 3, 2008

Response by poster: @rhizome; just google reader, but it's never given this problem before.

@finitejest--i do seem to remember a upgrade recently, but don't know how to convert back before the upgrade.
posted by uncballzer at 11:44 AM on April 3, 2008

I had a similar problem a while ago. I found that someone in our household had been bookmarking just about everything ever visited since the beginning of time. I removed most of the bookmarks and things worked nicely after that. FF seems to index these every so often, so other system slowdowns were resolved by this as well.
posted by kc0dxh at 4:26 PM on April 3, 2008

Response by poster: @kc0dxh--that's something I didn't think of. I'll give that a try
posted by uncballzer at 5:50 PM on April 3, 2008