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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. Turning on/off hardware acceleration. This has no impact whatsoever
  3. I have repeatedly deleted all cookies, history, and cache, and reset the startup cache.
  4. Clean install FF
  5. Refresh FF
  6. 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?

  • @Tubbles
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    561 year ago

    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

    • @[email protected]
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      521 year ago

      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.

      • @marcos
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        361 year ago

        Re-enable half of them at a time.

        • @legion
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          1 year ago

          My man’s out here binary search tree-ing his plugins, lol.

          • @[email protected]
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            1 year ago

            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…

          • Eager Eagle
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            11 year ago

            That’s how VS Code bisect works to narrow down problematic extensions.

        • @[email protected]
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          41 year ago

          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.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      11 year ago

      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.

  • @kite
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    271 year ago

    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 .

    • ArgentCorvid [Iowa]
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      71 year ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    171 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      41 year ago

      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.

    • Julian
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      21 year ago

      What the hell. I believe you but I’m so confused as to why that would happen lmao.

      • @[email protected]
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        61 year ago

        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
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        31 year ago

        Any hardware can fuck up your system. Usually it’s the driver’s fault.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      21 year ago

      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…

  • @StewartGilligan
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    111 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      11 year ago

      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

  • @rbar
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    101 year ago

    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.

  • @emptyother
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    81 year ago

    Downloaded installer or MSStore? I had an issue for a short time (a single version then it got fixed) where only the Store version caused system stuttering.

    Also maybe, you haven’t messed with Windows virtual memory page sizing?

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        51 year ago

        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.

  • @[email protected]
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    81 year ago

    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.

            • @[email protected]OP
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              11 year ago

              I found one that seems interesting:

              The program firefox.exe version 115.0.3.8607 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel.
               Process ID: 53b4
               Start Time: 01d9c57c9d42f8ed
               Termination Time: 6
               Application Path: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
               Report Id: 27a4cc4a-08e6-4c65-b42b-62f1fb26351a
               Faulting package full name: 
               Faulting package-relative application ID: 
               Hang type: Unknown
              

              But I don’t see any other logs around that incident. I also don’t see other, similar entries- that log is from yesterday, and I’ve had a couple of crashes today already that I don’t see showing up in the log.

              I don’t see anything in Security and Maintenance either, it just shows the same log as above.

              I checked the firewall and noticed something odd; Windows seems to think there is a second installation of Firefox on one of my other drives. No idea why though, I can’t find any evidence of it there…

    • @[email protected]OP
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      31 year ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    51 year ago

    You could try a VM with just Firefox to see if there’s another program interfering with it?

    • @[email protected]OP
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      41 year ago

      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.