What has happened to FireFox?!

Community
1

It seems like over the past few years FireFox has went to hell.

Frequently my browser freezes up with a “Mac Rainbow Wheel of Death” when I’m in FireFox.

And things can get so bad that I can’t even “Force Quit” out of FireFox.

Sometimes it locks up my system for anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes.

I have installed and uninstalled FireFox several times over the last few years, and considering I have a brand new MacBook Pro, I don’t buy the argument that “Well, you need a new computer!” :rolleyes:

Last night FireFox was really flipping out, and in a moment of anger, I deleted every trace of it off my new MBP.

After re-isntalling FF26, I see the following on a freshly booted computer…

(All of those blanks in the drop-down menu imply that I had 20 windows open, but I had just booted up, opened FireFox, and when straight to SitePoint. So I have no clue what all that phantom crap is?!)

Great, so my new install of FireFox has the same issues as last night. (Just wasted an hour of my life downloading and reinstalling everything!!) :mad:

What in the world has happened to FireFox???

(Normally I’d ditch an app in a heartbeat that acted as crappy as FireFox has become, HOWEVER, I love FireBug, and I also have too much on my plate as it is, to have to re-learn an entirely new Web Browser…)

Very frustrated,

Debbie

2

When you said you deleted all traces, did that include your existing Firefox profile? So you had to reset all of your settings, addons, etc?

3

That means I deleted this directory…


/Users/user1/Library/Application Support/Firefox

And deleted these files…


/Users/user1/Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox.plist

/Users/user1/Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.plugincontainer.plist

/Applications/Firefox.app

Then I emptied my Trash.

So, yes, I had to reconfigure FireFox all over and install Add-Ons and Extensions.

Sincerely,

Debbie

P.S. I also got rid of all things Flash. (As far as I know?!)

4

Hmm… Okay you did what I would have done. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Mac so I can’t tell you if I’m having similar problems, but maybe other Mac users are experiencing similar issues…

5

Ironically it’s Chrome and Safari that lock up for me, Firefox is always fine!

6

I switched to FireFox back when I was on Windows in maybe 2005 and for years I loved it. (It was so much quicker and simpler than Internet Explorer.)

But in the past 2-3 years I find that FireFox has hanged up on my old MacBook and my new MacBook Pro regularly.

It isn’t any one things that I do, nor is it any one website. But considering that most website I visit are News Websites (e…g. NY Times) or Developer Websites (e.g. SitePoint), there is no reason to be experiencing such issues.

Before I reinstalled things this morning, I was reading the news and FF locked up and up appeared the “Rainbow Wheel of Death”. (It took me 5 minutes to be able to get OS-X’s “Force Quit” to come up because my MBP was frozen!!!)

Totally unacceptable… :frowning:

Sincerely,

Debbie

7

Have you tried disabling each addon that you’ve got installed one at a time?

8

If you open those sites in “Private Window” is the problem alleviated at all?
My thinking is those sites might be using a lot of local storage to gather user statistics for business purposes.

9

I’ve noticed that 3rd party ads can slow pages to a crawl, and if there’s any naff javascript involved that doesn’t help. Might be worth installing AdblockPlus to Firefox to see if that makes things better :slight_smile:

10

Good point. I don’t have any problems with Firefox, but then again I started blocking advertisements when the heavy weights started to overwhelm my old dial-up connection.

11

No, but the only things I have are FireBug - usually off - and maybe one or two tiny ones like the Add-On that hides tabs.

Debbie

12

That suspiciously seems like something that would create invisible tabs…

13

I have no clue what that is?! :blush:

Well, I agree that the problem could be websites which have a really crappy design. (Of course that is 95% of the Internet!!)

Is there a way to turn OFF Flash on websites?

Would that be beneficial in general, or would that render most of the Internet useless to me?

Also, what about this “Ad Blocker” thingy that people keep bugging me to install and run?? :-/

It is not uncommon when I get the “Rainbow Wheel of Death” that I later get a popup complaining “Some script on www.SomeSite.com is unresponsive and may be tying up resources…”

But when that happens and I click “Stop Script” it doesn’t help.

More importantly, most of the time I am not getting any warnings, and FireFox just locks up. (A few times so bad, that I had to do a “Hard Reboot” on my old MacBook.) :mad:

God do I long for the days when the Internet had NO ADS and was just simple HTML files.

(Even on SitePoint, look at all of the aggravation I have with Ads…)

Sincerely,

Debbie

14

I’m old school and do NOT like Tab Browsing.

And I find it annoying how I still get ONE TAB when I turn off tabs in FireFox, so I installed this…

Hide Tab Bar With One Tab 1.2beta3

Other than that and FireBug 1.12.5, those are the only FireFox Extensions I have.

Here is a screenshot of my FF Plugins…

I think I have a very basic setup for FireFox… :blush:

Sincerely,

Debbie

15

I got sick of Firefox a few years ago and switched to Chrome. I’ve never looked back.

16

By default Firefox for Mac doesn’t have flash installed, I don’t use it in Firefox and apart from the odd video not working I don’t miss anything.

It’s a Firefox extension and literally blocks all ads (and associated data). On ad heavy sites pages typically load up to 5x quicker because you’re not downloading all the crap that goes with the ads.

That sounds like 3rd party ads javascript to me, using Adblocker I never get those problems.

17

I don’t use a Mac so I can’t tell. I don’t have any problems with FireFox. Actually, I don’t have problems with any browser. I use FF mainly but I use Chrome and Opera too. Both Windows and Linux. Well, and mobile too :lol:

18

I don’t have a mac either, but right now I’m having problems with FF: it freezes for 1-2 minutes when I open it. And sometimes it crashes the flash player.
It depends on the version I think. I had the same problems a couple of versions back, after that all worked fine, and now since a couple of weeks the problems are back again.

Of course it might also be a new version of one of the FF plugins I’m running. I didn’t install any new ones the last year though.

The only reason I keep using FF is because of its password manager.

19

I got my own password manager years ago (in my case, 1Password) and it’s great. I can access the passwords from any device, which is very cool.