Sep 08 2006

Firefox Stalls or Hangs

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Why Does Firefox Stall (Hang) Intermittently?

I have encountered this problem off and on. Below a list of possible reasons for Firefox hangs:

Potential Sources for Firefox Hanging

Hyperthreading
User Agent Switcher
JavaScript
MS Antispyware
McAffee Antivirus
Adobe TypeManager/ Font
Extensions
- Changes regularly as extensions are updated - post the extension you are having problems with below.

Some Solutions

My solution for the moment is to clear the cache, and reduce the memory load. I also had a problem with the Tabbrowser Extension (known also to conflict with FCKEditor and TinyMCE, among other things), which I replaced with TabMix Plus, and that seemed to solve the problem. Another extension that I think is great but unfortunately is experiencing extreme memory leaks is TagAlert. Hopefully a future release will solve the memory leak issues.

If All Else Fails

If all else fails reinstalling Firefox, disabling all extensions, and doing the following will most always solve any issue:

Windows: Rename the "Firefox" folder in the following directory: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla to something like "Firefox-bak" and reload Firefox. Post any questions below.

Tools:

For me it hangs while browsing Facebook

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Thu, 2010-04-15 03:59.

Every time I browse Facebook, Firefox hangs for sure, I guess its because of JavaScript, cos Facebook runs the chat app. n stuff using Java. I have not yet found a solution for this. I don't know if any extension is causing this. I will try disabling a few extensions and update if its solved. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Fixed it

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Thu, 2010-02-25 13:51.

For some of the non-tech I have just started using IE. Crap now I get with all the MS crap.

So here is a call for help. FIREFOX FIX IT. Just give me a new update and do what is needed. I don't have time for this and am getting pissed off restarting all the time. This brings be back to the good old blue screen of MS and a reboot to solve it.

Firefox, please don't get too big to care and start developing garage.

firebug causes hangs on many sites

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Mon, 2009-06-22 10:52.

firebug was causing many hangs for me. smartzip maps would not load until I disabled firebug or explicitly forced a refresh (CTRL-F5). disabling firebug not only made the hangs go away but my browsing experience was so much faster. I guess there is always a performance trade-off when running in some sort of "debug" mode.

Firefox hanging

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Wed, 2009-02-11 04:04.

Yup - I also had the history file problem. Thanks for the tips and the article, glad to have this working again.

Possibly unrelated, but Yahoo's finance site keeps freezing up in Firefox. Any idea why this would be happening?

history file was the problem for me

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Wed, 2008-10-08 00:40.

I had the same hanging problem with constant disk access whenever I try to load Firefox.

I got rid of places.sqlite and places.sqlite-journal and it worked again.

Remove places.sqlite and places.sqlite-journal

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Thu, 2009-05-21 19:57.

Getting rid of places.sqlite and places.sqlite-journal works too.

Thanks for the tip.

Worked for me

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Thu, 2009-08-06 16:40.

Thanks, this one has been wasting SOOO much of my time. This should be a bug.

Firefox solution

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Sat, 2008-10-04 00:08.

Hmm, nice stuff, I also was suffering from this trouble that Firefox used to hang over the period of time, I got the problem because the antivirus software would loose up the system and it results in the hanging the system, but when I found antispyware software the problem vanished very fast and I am happy.

Just formatted my machine... still stalls.

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Fri, 2008-10-03 15:36.

Ok.. so I just formatted, reinstalled windows... first thing I install is Firefox 3... Hangs immediately. So I try the compatibility mode change... now Firefox won't open. I have nothing in my extensions menu either. Any ideas? I'm lost now.

Ok... figured it out

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Wed, 2008-09-17 23:44.

In most cases, it's not extensions. If your history cache is too big, that is the cause. Delete old links from history and reduce the number of days of history to save and the problem will be fixed.

Reducing history worked for me too

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Wed, 2008-11-26 14:53.

Reducing the history solved the problem I had with my Firefox freezing for short periods of time. Tools -> Options -> Privacy. I then reduced the "Keep my history for at least" from 90 days to 7 days and clicked the "Clear Now" button to clear old history.

This also worked for me

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Wed, 2009-08-19 09:06.

This also worked for me, although I suspect it was the "Clear Now" more than reducing the history.

I selected the cache and cookies as well as browsing and search history with the Clear Now option.

firefox stall

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Sun, 2008-03-09 17:02.

check about:config for "network" and reset all entries you see had changed (in bold).

Google browser sync will cause stalls

Submitted by a visitor from afar on Wed, 2007-04-18 12:30.

For me, it was Google browser sync that caused a stall with a period of ~50 seconds. These were my debug steps: 0) Download Process Explorer from the MSFT site. 1) Start up firefox, but don't do anything with it. 2) Start Process Explorer and look at the CPU usage graph for firefox. 3) If you have my problem, you will see periodic spikes in CPU usage, even though nothing is happening. 4) Go to Tools->Add-ons and disable one of the extensions. 5) Restart firefox and observe CPU graph (it will be a new PID in Process Explorer, so you'll have to launch a new graph as well). 6) Repeat steps 2-5, changing only the extension that is disabled until you no longer see the spikes in the firefox process CPU graph.