# Firefox Hangs



## Fenrari (Sep 9, 2011)

In posting in this thread you promise to not do any of the following:

1. Any negative phrasing as to how I'm using Firefox instead of any other browser.


So onto my issue.


I need my Firefox to stop freezing every 10->20 minutes. It'll freeze up and give me a "Firefox has stopped responding" message. If I let it sit for like 15 seconds though, it'll clear up and everything will be functional again. Doesn't matter what I'm doing, how many tabs I have open or if it's the only program running...

And in case you must know I'm using both Firefox and Chrome because I like keeping my furry world in one and my human world in the other (seperate twitters, facebooks, tabs, tumblr, etc.)

I've tried the following...

1. Restarted my computer.

2. Updated Firefox to the newest version.

3. Full Virus scan with avast and Malwarebytes (both clean)

4. Disabled all addons/extras.

5. Sat in the corner with my head angrily glaring at my PC for freezing up during the middle of futurama 

I'm running on my laptop in case you were wondering.

No my laptop is not over heating. 

Thank You for your help!


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## Onnes (Sep 9, 2011)

It could be due to a virus scanner, but avast tends to be pretty well-built in that regard.
I think it's most likely to be a corrupted installation or profile. The fix there would be to reinstall Firefox, and if that doesn't work then wipe out the profile. If you really don't want to wipe out the profile then you could google for the commonly problematic components and remove them one by one individually.


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## Fenrari (Sep 9, 2011)

Onnes said:


> It could be due to a virus scanner, but avast tends to be pretty well-built in that regard.
> I think it's most likely to be a corrupted installation or profile. The fix there would be to reinstall Firefox, and if that doesn't work then wipe out the profile. If you really don't want to wipe out the profile then you could google for the commonly problematic components and remove them one by one individually.



I thought it might be my avast running in the background as well, and I tried a session without it running  NO beans.


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## SnowFox (Sep 9, 2011)

You could just rename your profile folders and let it create a new one to see if it makes a difference. (This will probably temporarily remove your add-ons too)

I think on windows its "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla" and "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Mozilla"

If it doesn't help just delete the new folders and rename the old ones back.


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## Fenrari (Sep 9, 2011)

SnowFox said:


> You could just rename your profile folders and let it create a new one to see if it makes a difference. (This will probably temporarily remove your add-ons too)
> 
> I think on windows its "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla" and "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Mozilla"
> 
> If it doesn't help just delete the new folders and rename the old ones back.



THANKS! I think that might have fixed it. Though now I don't have any of my old stuff so I'm gonna need to upload everything again


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## SnowFox (Sep 9, 2011)

Fenrari said:


> THANKS! I think that might have fixed it. Though now I don't have any of my old stuff so I'm gonna need to upload everything again



As long as you just renamed the folders and didn't delete them you can probably salvage your stuff.

The "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla" folder is the one with your settings in.

Have a look in the Firefox\Profiles\<random letters>.default subfolder. you can probably drag over a copy of every file directly under it and maybe any subfolders like "bookmarkbackups" etc into the corresponding folder in the new profile.

If that breaks it again, well oops.

Or you could just copy it over in bits to narrow it down if you can be bothered to do it that way.


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## grimtotem (Sep 10, 2011)

i never have this problem with chrome.


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## Fenrari (Sep 10, 2011)

grimtotem said:


> i never have this problem with chrome.



*In posting in this thread you promise to not do any of the following:

1. Any negative phrasing as to how I'm using Firefox instead of any other browser.*

Chrome isn't perfect. Without Adblock Plus I will constantly get barraged by popups for Colleges and other BS while I'm online. I like the power of being able to wade through the rivers of spam.


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## Runefox (Sep 10, 2011)

To be fair, Chrome _does_ have Adblock nowadays. That said, I personally use Firefox because it's easier to get running on multiple platforms and it also takes up less screen real estate (one of the reasons I switched to Chrome to begin with).


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## djraverfox (Sep 15, 2011)

New Firefox update pretty much killed my history with Firefox. Using Chrome now. -_______-


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## grimtotem (Sep 15, 2011)

Fenrari said:


> *In posting in this thread you promise to not do any of the following:
> 
> 1. Any negative phrasing as to how I'm using Firefox instead of any other browser.*
> 
> Chrome isn't perfect. Without Adblock Plus I will constantly get barraged by popups for Colleges and other BS while I'm online. I like the power of being able to wade through the rivers of spam.



never said chrome was perfect or anything negitive about firefox, just stating that i never have this problem with chrome. its up to u how its interpreted


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## ArielMT (Sep 15, 2011)

Stay on topic, please.  This is a Firefox technical support thread, not a browser preference thread.


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## CyberFoxx (Sep 15, 2011)

Also, a good thing to do, if you ever need to re-create a profile, is to setup Firefox Sync before hand. Firefox Sync will optionally upload your bookmarks, history, preferences, passwords and tabs to Mozilla's servers. And you can have it all encrypted of course. I think Firefox Sync has been built into Firefox since version 4.


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## Fenrari (Sep 15, 2011)

CyberFoxx said:


> Also, a good thing to do, if you ever need to re-create a profile, is to setup Firefox Sync before hand. Firefox Sync will optionally upload your bookmarks, history, preferences, passwords and tabs to Mozilla's servers. And you can have it all encrypted of course. I think Firefox Sync has been built into Firefox since version 4.



I'll definitely have to look into that, it sounds like something that would be really helpful.


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## CaptainCool (Sep 15, 2011)

i have always had the same issue with firefox. for some reason it gets incredibly slow after about 2 months or so >_> i made a new profile 2 months ago and im feeling it get incredibly slow again XP
this is really quite annoying and im pretty much in the same boat as you are. chrome and other browsers just dont have some of the addons that firefox has available. im a really big fan of the downloadhelper for example but that thing simply doesnt exist for chrome.


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## Lobar (Sep 15, 2011)

I've been having a similar problem to the OP, every few minutes Firefox freezes up (Not Responding) no matter what I'm doing, then unfreezes 5-10 seconds later like it never happened.  Today is the first time it's ever done that.


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## Ricky (Sep 15, 2011)

Lobar said:


> I've been having a similar problem to the OP, every few minutes Firefox freezes up (Not Responding) no matter what I'm doing, then unfreezes 5-10 seconds later like it never happened.  Today is the first time it's ever done that.



.02:

That means it's busy and you should wait...

Programs say not responding all the time.  I don't know if you hit a lock or something or it's just using lots of resources putting shit into memory but it doesn't really seem like a problem.

I'd look more closely at what it's doing when this happens.  Does the page have a lot of content?  Is there a lot of JS on the page?  (hint: you can disable JS and see what happens)

Yadda, yadda...

If you're really curious run strace or some debugging tool so you can see what's going on when it happens.

This definitely happens to me though, and it's annoying.  The fucking program shouldn't just lock up...  (I think it does this with heavy JS although there's a check, but JS is single threaded, Firefox is not???  so what's the deal)

The new version seems to have some annoyances though.  I think I noticed this recently and also, typing javascript: whatever in the URL no longer works.

WTF Mozilla D:


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## Onnes (Sep 15, 2011)

If it's happening for 5-10 seconds every few minutes, it really has to be either a broken virus scanner or firewall, corrupted disk or memory, or a corrupted Firefox profile.

If it's less frequent, it could be something like virus scanner auto-updating. For example, Avira AntiVir will default to auto-update every 2 hours I believe, and it will freeze Firefox while it installs.


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## Lobar (Sep 15, 2011)

I have the NoScript add-on, so JS has nothing to do with it.  Anti-virus is avast.  It happens on any page regardless of content, it happened once while I was scrolling down to read responses on this page and again mid-sentence as I typed this reply.


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## Ricky (Sep 15, 2011)

Onnes said:


> If it's happening for 5-10 seconds every few minutes, it really has to be either a broken virus scanner or firewall, corrupted disk or memory, or a corrupted Firefox profile.



Right, because there's NOTHING ELSE that could POSSIBLY cause FF to hang :roll:

Not that I know how the hell you are coming to any of those conclusions in the first place.



Lobar said:


> I have the NoScript add-on, so JS has nothing to do  with it.  Anti-virus is avast.  It happens on any page regardless of  content, it happened once while I was scrolling down to read responses  on this page and again mid-sentence as I typed this reply.



Well, it could be the plugin but who knows.

Maybe try uninstalling all plugins (temporarily) for shits and giggles?


EDIT:  As an afterthought, this has only happened to me on Windows.  Coincidence?


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## Lobar (Sep 15, 2011)

Put Firefox in Safe Mode and the problem isn't present.  Guess it is an add-on, now just to figure out which one and if a fix is in the works.


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## Ricky (Sep 15, 2011)

Software is so damned complicated...


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## OnyxVulpine (Sep 19, 2011)

I was getting this same problem with both 6 and 7. But there was an update a week or so ago and it seems to have either stopped completely or only happens when I click on something, change my mind then click on some other things all really quickly.


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## Ricky (Sep 19, 2011)

OnyxVulpine said:


> I was getting this same problem with both 6 and 7. But there was an update a week or so ago and it seems to have either stopped completely or only happens when I click on something, change my mind then click on some other things all really quickly.



That sounds like a race condition...


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## Lobar (Sep 20, 2011)

I ultimately solved my problem by disabling Torbutton.  I never had Tor enabled while I was browsing, but somehow that was the root of the problem for me.


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## Lunar (Sep 20, 2011)

I've been having a problem with it, too.  A page stops loading when I stop moving the mouse, same goes for .gif images and things such as YouTube videos.  When I quit my FireFox session and start it back up again, it goes back to running just fine.


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## Ricky (Sep 20, 2011)

lunar_helix said:


> I've been having a problem with it, too.  *A page stops loading when I stop moving the mouse*, same goes for .gif images and things such as YouTube videos.



Okay, that's just *fucking weird.*


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## Lunar (Sep 20, 2011)

Ricky said:


> Okay, that's just *fucking weird.*


And I don't know how to fix it, except to just close the window and start again.


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## Ricky (Sep 20, 2011)

lunar_helix said:


> And I don't know how to fix it, except to just close the window and start again.



Like in that other thread, you may want to disable all the add-ons temporarily just to rule them out.

Otherwise, I don't know???

It seems like something from Speed -- IF YOU DON'T STOP MOVING YOUR MOUSE YOUR BROWSER WILL EXPLODE


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## Lunar (Sep 20, 2011)

Ricky said:


> Like in that other thread, you may want to disable all the add-ons temporarily just to rule them out.
> 
> Otherwise, I don't know???
> 
> It seems like something from Speed -- IF YOU DON'T STOP MOVING YOUR MOUSE YOUR BROWSER WILL EXPLODE


I think it's time for a complete reformat anyway... My laptop apparently loves fucking Thai hookers.  Horny bastard.


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## ArielMT (Sep 20, 2011)

Ricky said:


> Okay, that's just *fucking weird.*



I've seen that happen with Firefox's plugin container on rare occasion.  Restarting Firefox is the only fix I know of.


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## Fenrari (Sep 22, 2011)

lunar_helix said:


> I've been having a problem with it, too.  A page stops loading when I stop moving the mouse, same goes for .gif images and things such as YouTube videos.  When I quit my FireFox session and start it back up again, it goes back to running just fine.



I've had this happen with my megavideo links  It's just annoying to have to keep flicking my mouse whenever I want the newest episode of something to load. (Yeah no I'm not paying for cable if I don't own a TV, or a location that I call home for that matter).


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