I switched back to firefox last week because I wanted to get away from Chromium. I was previously using Brave.
I have been having a MULTITUDE of issues with FF this week, and if I can’t figure out how to resolve them I’m going back to Brave. I’ve tried everything I can think to do to fix it, and nothing has worked. I’ve never seen any of these issues on any other browsers, this is 100% a firefox problem.
I’m on the latest build of FF on Windows 10 and have the following plugins:
- Bitwarden
- UBlockOrigin
- Simple Login
- Multi-account Containers
- ProtonVPN
- Old Reddit Redirect
- RES
- Enhancer for Youtube
The issues I’m having:
- Occasionally FF just hangs, won’t respond to inputs, and the only way to recover it is to kill the process via control panel. When FF crashes like this I NEVER see the crash reporter, it’s like FF thinks nothing happened and everything is fine.
- Sometimes my tabs just don’t work. Like, I’ll open a tab, type something in to search it, and it just hangs. I had this problem for YEARS when FF was my daily browser before switching to brave 2 years back because it got too annoying. This issue is COMPLETELY RANDOM, and happens within 1 minute of making a new tab- sometimes it will happen when I first try to navigate anywhere inside the new tab, sometimes it happens after I’m in a website.
- Sometimes FF refuses to start. I’ll turn the computer on, click FF, and nothing will happen- then I’ll go into control panel, kill the FF process, and try again until it works- usually when I do this the browser crashes at least once when it starts.
I can’t make any sense of why this browser is so unstable for me, but it is SIGNIFICANTLY worse than it was last time I abandoned FF. I actually have FEWER addons than I did when I used FF as my daily driver before. If I can’t figure this out this time I’m just not going to look back.
I have tried:
- Safe mode. This seems to fix it for a bit, but eventually either tabs stop working or the browser crashes. I’m pretty confident this is NOT an issue with any of my plugins- I’m using either official FF ones (multi-account containers) or very reputable plugins from good sources.
- Turning on/off hardware acceleration. This has no impact whatsoever
- I have repeatedly deleted all cookies, history, and cache, and reset the startup cache.
- Clean install FF
- Refresh FF
- Last time I tried to fix FF before switching to Brave, I found that having the FF Profiler running AT ALL TIMES actually seemed to make things a little bit better- but the profiler never once turned up anything useful.
I’m at my wits end here. I really want to be able to move off of chromium but FF is so incredibly annoying to use in its current state that I simply can’t do that until I find fixes to these issues. Has anyone here got any clue what else I can do to try to diagnose this?
Have you tried a fresh profile? If you have the same issues as before then it sounds like you’re running your old one too. And it could also be a single one of those add-ons bring the issue, so try figure that out too if the fresh profile doesn’t do the trick.
This is really the most important thing to try. A fresh profile with maybe only ublock origin as the only add on. If that is still causing problems then the root issue is probably something else.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles
This. Go to
about:profiles,Create a New Profile, then set it as the new default profile (optional), and just launch profile in new browser.
Unfortunately this is 100% an issue with your system and not Firefox.
I have the same (or at least very similar) issues on my system. So it probably is some sort of Firefox issue.
This reeks of a problem with your system, not Firefox.
Are you using an HDD or SDD?
That’s what I think as well. I’ve been using FF for a few years now and never face these problems.
SSD.
I’m running an I9-9900K CPU, a GTX4070TI, and have 32gb of ram. I’m pretty certain it isn’t a hardware issue…
Ctrl+shift+esc
Performance tab
Click on memory
What speed is listed on that tab for your memory? Actually a screenshot of this would be way better.
In the meantime, grab revo uninstaller and uninstall Firefox with it, making sure to nix all found files and registry keys associated with it.
Are you running AV besides windows defender? If you are, uninstall that junk too and reenable windows defender.
Actually, Bulk Crap Uninstaller is the better way to go over Revo. Does everything Revo does, and more, and it’s FOSS.
The memory speed is 3600mHz, I don’t think the ram is the problem…
As I said elsewhere, I don’t use any other AV other than Windows Defender. The others are all just malware in disguise.
Okay next thing to try, go to portableapps.com and get Firefox from there and see how it runs.
So I ended up reinstalling windows, and that seems to have fixed the problems. Not really sure what was causing it in the end; if they start happening again I’ll post something here. Thanks for the help!
I’m glad you got it sorted! I really wish we could have figured out what was going on but hopefully reinstalling solves any other issues that that one issue might have been causing in the background.
Cheers!
You are the MVP man! You never gave up!
I’m pretty certain you should run a thorough memtest on your RAM.
Some of the issues you’ve described are similar to what was happening to me due to unknowingly using RAM with a 64KB bad area on it.
I don’t know why Firefox is particularly sensitive to bad-RAM but it is. (Although I did have some of them happen with LibreOffice occasionally, the failure to start for example.)
I would disable any custom fonts you have added to Windows too. Or at least check them for font conflicts. And check the reliability reporter to see if it says anything in particular about the days when FF crashes.
EDIT: I also just noticed you have a VPN in your plugins. The Firefox VPN used to behave pretty wonkily if it got a bad connection and could look like everything was frozen. This would be my immediate prime suspect if you think it’s extensions.
I also agree a fresh profile is a huge pain but worth a shot if all else fails. It can make a difference when you can’t trace down what about:config you boned horribly haha.
Hmmmm that’s a thought, though I’m not sure why my nice monospace font would break FF, it isn’t using it. I may try this though, it’s worth a shot…
I recently spilled water on my mouse. Everything seemed fine, but ff kept hanging more or less as you describe. Swapped out the mouse and it was fine.
Probably isn’t your problem, just thought I’d let you know.
This makes me seriously consider whether my mouse could be the problem; I may buy a new one soon anyways. My mouse sometimes does some WEIRD stuff, it’s rather old.
… I’ll have to consider this. I don’t have a second mouse to use, so I can’t test it rn.
I’m using a utechsmart venus for what its worth.
What the hell. I believe you but I’m so confused as to why that would happen lmao.
I don’t know exactly but it doesn’t really surprise me honestly. water may have made an intermittent short (intermittent as in, a million times per second). imagine if a single actual click sent 3 million click signals.
Browsers have js hooks for mouse events. A poorly designed website (or a well designed one) could easily shit itself if you send 3 million clicks before it has processed the first one.
In my case it didn’t seem to effect other apps but that may just be because the browser always had the focus whenever something glitched out.
I have no idea if this is likely or even possible but it seems like a plausible way that a mouse could fuck up a browser.
- Rikudou_Sage ( @rikudou@lemmings.world ) 3•2 years ago
Any hardware can fuck up your system. Usually it’s the driver’s fault.
I’d run a memory test overnight.
Memory test ran overnight and detected no issues.
Doing this now before bed.
You can try a fork of Firefox like Waterfox or Libre Wolf just to see if the problems are repeated there. They use the same base engine but tweak different things.
Works fine on my Mac and Linux machines. Maybe this is a Windows issue.
Nah it ran just fine on my old 4670K from 2013 running on Windows 8.1 (and then later 10), all the way until last year when I finally built a new PC. No issues whatsoever.
It runs fine on the overwhelming majority of computers, there is zero chances that these issues are widespread for windows users, it would basically mean Firefox is completely broken.
Not a debugging help, but: I have the same issues. Especially the tab thing. Open one, try to open a page, nothing happens. This is especially bad on android for me.
Number 3 is something Firefox has done for ages, even before quantum. It will refuse to start of there is another, non-responding, instance running. I think they actually added a dialog for it that sometimes works.
Number 1 is something I see on Linux every now and then. For me, only the mouse input is ignored then. But sometimes Firefox just hangs without crashing (Probably some loop somewhere went nuts).
I do not have solutions for this. I just want to add, that it probably is not because of OPs system.
Is it feasible to reinstall Windows? Always a fresh start fix all these problems.
NGL I haven’t considered this yet; it IS feasible though, I’d just have to make a bootable ISO drive and dig up my product key which is buried… somewhere.
I’ll consider doing that if I can’t find anything else to fix this but I’d rather not.
You can activate it without a key ;)
No need for your key, it’s tied to your hardware
You could try a VM with just Firefox to see if there’s another program interfering with it?
For what it’s worth FF seems to work just fine with the same extensions on my laptop, which runs Mint. So it’s most likely something with my desktop, but I haven’t got a clue what.
Are you running this on the same PC/OS install that you were having problems on previously?
Yes, I am. So I figure some of the problems are the same problems that I saw before.
But it’s a completely clean install- I made sure all of the old files were completely wiped, even the profiles in /Appdata/
give nighlty I try on my second old phone were Firefox was not usable is now working quite well (for the old hardware snapdragon 660 and 4 giga of ram )the only sad part is opening or focusing url bar (which still show home )is painfully laggy and slow
I once uninstalled a program that took a library that Firefox was using with it and had similar results. Drove me goddamn mad trying to figure it out. If it’s anything like that, I recommend just going back to chrome, or trying Firefox in a VM to pick it apart if you’re feeling incredibly motivated. Took me days to diagnose and a minute to download the fix.
Wouldn’t that be fixed by a fresh install though? I haven’t uninstalled anything in the last few days…
By god do I wish it had. Reinstalling didn’t bring back the library that my fan temp monitor murder suicided. I had to dissect friggin everything. Eventually it said that “‘insert name here’ stopped working” and I simply redownloaded it from Microsoft. It was strictly extreme obstinance that let me find the answer.
Something that may help with diagnosis is to try a portable version of firefox. If the portable version works properly and your installed version does not then it could be either some setting or library that is having problems.
Would also try running as a different user to see if maybe the issue is with something in your user profile.