Firefox problems..

[zircon]

I'm on a very fast computer (e6600 2.4ghz) that is clean of spyware/viruses, relatively new (<3 months), and has 2GB of RAM. The last few days however Firefox has been acting up. It suddenly becomes extremely slow and unresponsive, basically locking up. It does this at sites that I visit all the time like OCR, Gmail, and KVRAudio. I have two extensions installed that I've had for over a week (DownthemAll and an image zoom thing). I've cleared my cache/history to no effect. I can only browse for about 15-20 minutes now before experiencing this. I usually only have 3-4 tabs open, too, and I've easily had 10+ before with no problems. What's the deal?

Version 2.0.0.3.

[Liontamer]

I'm not claiming to have an answer, but Firefox sometimes has memory leaks. Maybe it's something that'll get fixed up with a new version.

[The Coop]

Try going back to a previous version, like 2.0.0.2. or 2.0.0.1., and see if it still has trouble. Be sure to turn off FireFox's automatic updates, so that if things are working fine again, it won't update itself on you and force you to do the whole process again. There have been a lot of issues with 2.0.0.3., and you may have just started being affected by one of them.

Don't know if it'll work, but 2.0.0.2 and 2.0.0.3. have given me big time headaches by crashing all the time when posting on forums, and a downgrade to 2.0.0.1. fixed that.

[phill]

Something to give a try, go in to about:config and search for browser.cache.disk.capacity and play with that a little.

[Forty-second]

I have this same problem.... firefox just lags for no real reason. This has been going on for awhile now, and I cannot find a reason....

[Xerol Oplan]

I've been having the same problem for the last week.

[K999]

Are you sure that do don't have any spyware/viruses? I actually have very similar computer (e6600) and I was also dealing with this issue a few weeks ago. In my particular case it turned out to be a number of malware and viruses. And this happened even with kaspersky virus scanner running in the background. After I got rid of them, there were no further problems with firefox.

Currently I am having the same problem with IE7. It turns out there are virus problems this time as well.

Oh, and I also noted that when I try to surf with torrent running in the background, due to uploading my surfing speed slows down. I know this is quite obvious but sometimes people overlook the obvious.

[Xerol Oplan]

This isn't a bandwidth issue, I know that for sure. Firefox will use 100% CPU for about 6-7 seconds whenever opening a tab or loading a page that's anything but plain text.

[Forty-second]

Not a bandwith issue as far as I know. It will just randomly freeze up like when I'm trying to scroll down the page or just moving the mouse around. I used the online symantec virus scan and it came up nothing, plus there's a firewall on the network, so afaik it's not viruses.

[Effef]

For anyone else using Windows Vista:

Is Firefox 2.4 really unstable with embedded flash?

This might affect other versions of windows too, i dunno.

EDIT: For instance, I can't even open plopbox.com

[Drack]

I have noticed some unstable behavior since the 2.0.0.4 upgrade as well.

Mozilla needs better beta testing before pushing this update automatically to all users. I may have to downgrade and turn auto update off because of this. I think that will fix your problem.

[Forty-second]

I'm actually starting to suspect that this might be a problem with java... I often get the error "a script has become nonresponsive" with the options to stop script or continue. Could this be a problem related to firefox's lags?

[Liontamer]

Well, these recent posts answer my question about accepting the 2.0.0.4 auto-update...

[Thalzon]

I have this problem too. It started when I downloaded something I shouldn't have and got swarmed with viruses and malware. I downloaded a ton of programs, fixed them up, and now as far as I can tell I'm free of malware. However, the one thing that remains is this Firefox trouble. It takes ages to boot up, and lags for a couple seconds after loading a page, or even when typing a message. It's a pain, and it never did this before the viruses. I'm swept for spyware, malware, viruses, and even cleaned out my registry of useless pieces, but this slowdown remains. What's the cure for this? What antivirus program can get rid of this annoyance?

EDIT: Switching to Opera seems to have alleviated a few of these issues. A few sites run much faster, some are the same speed as Firefox version 2.0.0.4 still, though. But hey, I can live with it as long as it's not EVERY page doing it.

[Pyrion]

Are you sure it's the browser at fault?

How many open connections do you typically have, and do you have your tcpip.sys patched to allow more than ten simultaneous connections?