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?
Unfortunately this is 100% an issue with your system and not Firefox.
Edit: sorry if that reply wasn’t helpful. Just calling it out to prevent the inevitable comments blaming Firefox itself lol.
I have the same (or at least very similar) issues on my system. So it probably is some sort of Firefox issue.
Oh man. Many, MANY years ago I had what certainty looks like an identical problem. I actually jumped so for several years because I couldn’t stand it any longer and no one could help me. I’m trying to remember what I finally did that solved it, and I’m about 95% sure I had to create a brand new, clean profile. Just reinstalling or refreshing firefox did not do the trick, I had to make a new profile. It was so long ago that I have zero recollection of how to do even that anymore, but if I were you, I’d give it a shot .
Yes this is the stock answer when FF starts getting weird. It’s been a while since I have has to do it. I think they even have a tool to do it now.
I’d start by disabling the plugins one by one or a couple at a time to see if any of them might be the culprit
I prefer disable them all and see if it works. Then renewable one at a time.
This way you know straight away if that’s maybe the issue.
Re-enable half of them at a time.
My man’s out here binary search tree-ing his plugins, lol.
This is the correct way to troubleshoot electronics issues as well.
More of a binary chop really.
Anyone who survived the Mac operating system prior to OSX is well familiar with this methodology haha.
Same with Adobe Type Manager when they stopped doing font duplicate deconfliction…
That’s how VS Code bisect works to narrow down problematic extensions.
This is my preferred method. Enable half, test for a couple days, swap to the other half, and try again. If the issue doesn’t present itself, then enabling all brings the issue back, it’s a conflict issue. Keep enabling different combinations such as odd/even, first/third quarter, etc until you narrow down the exact combo that can reproduce. With a lot of plugins having vocal communities, you could probably post to the two that have the conflict and one could figure out that the other is causing the symptom and maybe even fix it.
This is The Way!
I’ve done this; the results are basically random.
It doesn’t seem to be any individual plugin. Sometimes disabling one plugin seems to fix the issues for a while, but they come back. Sometimes I’ll disable multiple and nothing changes. I’ve tried different combinations each day this week and haven’t seen anything to suggest that it helped.
Like I said, even if I run in safe mode I eventually see problems come up. It’s very strange.
This reeks of a problem with your system, not Firefox.
Are you using an HDD or SDD?
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.)
That’s what I think as well. I’ve been using FF for a few years now and never face these problems.
I’d run a memory test overnight.
Doing this now before bed.
Memory test ran overnight and detected no issues.
Can you try using a tool like Crystal disk to check your drive health. Once when I had similar symptoms my drive was just weeks from failing completely.
Crystal Disk shows all of my drives as healthy
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.
Firefox (in my experience) does seem to lag on some devices especially ones that run older hardware. I have a really old Windows 7 laptop tucked away somewhere that had both Firefox and Chrome installed.
While Chrome runs like a hot knife through butter, I can’t say the same about Firefox. I popped open a Windows 8 VM as well and Firefox still seems to run smoothly on that. On my relatively newer laptop, Firefox runs like a breeze.
One of the main culprits might be your hardware (most likely RAM) or your OS. If the above 2 aren’t the issue, then I’d suggest making a new profile with no modifications and see how that runs. If that doesn’t work then try using the Firefox Extended Support Release. It’s known to be more stable and less frequent to crashes.
My hardware is almost certainly not the problem; I built this PC in 2019 and everything is still working great. I have more than enough ram
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.
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.
Any hardware can fuck up your system. Usually it’s the driver’s fault.
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.
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.
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.
Do you get any other issues on your pc not related to firefox
Also note down the times the issues occur and look at the event viewer in Windows and look at the times you’ve noted down to see if you can see anything odd
The ideal way to troubleshoot is to get as much information as you can about the issue before you begin troubleshooting steps
The only other oddity I have is with my mouse. Sometimes it will do some weird thing, and I think it’s the brand and it’s drivers not being great. I’ve ordered a new one that should come today, and when it comes I plan on reinstalling windows. If that doesn’t fix this… tbh nothing will.
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…
Can you reproduce the issue with no extensions running?
Can you reproduce the issue on a different machine?
Try to isolate the variables that are causing the issue.
Vanilla Firefox with no modifications, no extensions, nothing, does it reproduce the issue?
I’m not encountering issues like you’re describing, so I think it’s something specific to your environment
Yeah. Do it methodically. And only change one setting / addon at a time or you’re never going to figure out the cause.
