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.
Re-enable half of them at a time.
My man’s out here binary search tree-ing his plugins, lol.
That’s how VS Code bisect works to narrow down problematic extensions.
This is the correct way to troubleshoot electronics issues as well.
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…
More of a binary chop really.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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. Go to
about:profiles,Create a New Profile, then set it as the new default profile (optional), and just launch profile in new browser.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
Any crash logs in
about:crashes?Other resources:
Nope, none at all. It’s like FF doesn’t recognize that it’s crashing.
Do you have an AV running? I know that there was some issues in the past with some AV software causing trouble. (injecting stuff into dlls i think or something)
Nope, just Windows Defender, I think other AVs are just as bad as malware.
Ok, if you have no other software that could interfere, i would suggest next to take a look into the Windows Event Manager/Logger and see if you can find anything there at the time when the issue happen(ed/s)
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: UnknownBut 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…
Very strange that not all crashes are recorded … makes it seem like there isnt just one issue … but maybe different ones.
Could you please try and install the Firefox ESR version … and see if that behaves the same way? Just so we have a bit more data on when/how the problem happens. Report back with your findings.
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…
The only issue I have with Firefox is on mobile (Android) swiping left or right in Google Image search results is totally broken. It’s almost impossible to swipe left or right through the image results
Have you tried DDG?
It works fine in DuckDuckGo. I actually just tried it again it in Firefox Nightly and it worked fine. I saw my Firefox Nightly was updated this morning, here’s hoping that was a bug they patched?
Maybe yeah!
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?
There are some hidden MS plug-ins in the MS Store, lol. Better to get it straight from FF
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.
I once uninstalled a program that took a library that Firefox was using with it and had similar results. Drove me goddamn mad trying to figure it out. If it’s anything like that, I recommend just going back to chrome, or trying Firefox in a VM to pick it apart if you’re feeling incredibly motivated. Took me days to diagnose and a minute to download the fix.
Wouldn’t that be fixed by a fresh install though? I haven’t uninstalled anything in the last few days…
By god do I wish it had. Reinstalling didn’t bring back the library that my fan temp monitor murder suicided. I had to dissect friggin everything. Eventually it said that “‘insert name here’ stopped working” and I simply redownloaded it from Microsoft. It was strictly extreme obstinance that let me find the answer.
I’d run a memory test overnight.
Memory test ran overnight and detected no issues.
Doing this now before bed.
Are you running this on the same PC/OS install that you were having problems on previously?
Yes, I am. So I figure some of the problems are the same problems that I saw before.
But it’s a completely clean install- I made sure all of the old files were completely wiped, even the profiles in /Appdata/
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.
