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?
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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
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.
