Firefox has become such a massive piece of garbage. I have been a stubborn supporter of Netscape and Mozilla since the 1990s, and I know all of the antitrust nonsense with Microshite and with writing programming hostile to Netscape. But over the last several years Firefox has become a major pain in my ass. It completely chokes, especially on aggressive and heavy sites like Facebook (which is also a POS). It hangs in memory even after I’ve shut it down. And it takes FOREVER to start it back up. I often find myself having to reboot my machine just to refresh things. And now it takes 20 minutes to get firefox to become functional, after I start the program. I really will be sad to be forced to us Chrome or ‘Bing’, or whatever the current incarnation of Microshite’s web browser is. I’ve always been a supporter of open-source software. But things have become ridiculous.
If other things on your computer perform much faster I suspect the problem is in the Firefox configuration or add-ons, not Firefox itself. Firefox performance has improved significantly over the years.
Try running in Troubleshooting mode (the menu on the right edge, select Help and then Troubleshooting Mode… If that helps try disabling add-ons outside of Troubleshooting Mode until performance gets better. You can also select “Refresh Firefox” for automatic cleanup of cruft.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings
Are you reloading ALL of your tabs at startup? By default, only the active tab in each open window is reloaded (“on demand” loading, per browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand).
You keep “handling” the problems you understand, by suggesting what everyone but a Firefox techlord would consider a supreme hassle. It’s a BROWSER, not his life’s bread and butter. You love tinkering and tuning Firefox? Most of us wouldn’t want to. This kind of performance problem should not be addressed by diddling with little tunable controls. All of this should be seamless. Certainly he shouldn’t have to wade into this place and post to get a series of workarounds. Also, you don’t address all of his pain points, only the ones you recognize.
Hi Peter, if you think the other replies were inadequate, you are invited to pitch in and help.
Thanks for the attempted guilt trip. This is helping. I am an original Firefox user and you should be grateful to have my input heard as much as his. OP’s tone is not pleasant, but then the user experience is sometimes about as rude as it can get, so it’s fair. I already had a little taste of arrogance from other stewards, particularly Selena Deckelmann. You seem to ignore the fact that Firefox is a habitat that we must rely on every day. We literally live there. (Actually, I’m writing from Chrome right now.) You have a zoo with 120 million animals: most of them are docile, a few wild. You rearrange or disrupt the environment of one of the wilder ones, this is what you get. That’s all there is to it. Grow a thicker skin.
If you want to be a steward, then you should expect users to express frustration, however seemingly irrational. Yet when an institution has problems that get criticized, the cadres start getting defensive. Better to listen carefully to what he’s saying and try to tease out his specific meaning, not “handle” him with excessively technical solutions.
Show me how I should do it.
Are you a “steward” or whatever? I agree with the first post and the other. You come off as a smart XXX that doesn’t have time to bother with the commoners. The last upgrade of firefox crashed my system and when I finally got it running again I have lost my tool bar, and I no longer am able to avoid ads on youtube. Why in the world would you fix something that is NOT broken?
Code: “I am trying very hard to get something done during the precious hours in my daily life, but some change in Firefox’s longtime behavior is now getting in my way.”
Code: “I do care about Netscape. I too am part of this community, just as a grocery shoppers or retired people are part of their neighborhoods. Mozilla funding derives in part from my status as a loyal member of my community. (Aside: Although I have stayed abreast of my community’s technical saga since the code was Netscape - you might call me a veteran - I and most other users have no intention to become a technical part of this community. And yet I am far more abreast of the situation long-term than most regular users, and that should command some respect.)”
Code: “The technical problems I cite are a complex of problems, examples, not merely things to be ‘handled’ by individual, ad hoc, and rather complicated and tedious technical approaches and tweaking. These kinds of problems are likely (or darned well should be) already classified and well known in Firefox’s longtime unresolved issues cluster, so I imagine experienced section managers should understand my shorthand and not task me with the busywork to translate. It should be enough to register my excessive frustration, with the derailment of yet another day. Are you even aware that these things happen to millions of people every day?”
Code: “I am in a very difficult place right now. I need Firefox. It has been part of my home, part of my life, for decades now. I have been a member of this community for so long that it would cause me great physical inconvenience and even emotional pain – on top of what I have suffered already – to have to move. Yet I have nothing much to threaten you with. I can’t take your money away, and I know that if I go away then my voice and time will be even further disregarded (as in: ‘Thank goodness all of the complainers and haters are leaving. That leaves us with [1] the complacent users with extremely low demands and who don’t know where or how to plead with us in discourse, and [2] our class of people, the power users, who are willing to open the hood’).”
Did you really need this translation? If you like, I can teach Mozilla developers a whole online seminar on how to listen to users.
Hi Peter, I guess I have a habit of trying to fix things rather than simply reflecting on them as general complaints. Based on your interpretation, reduced performance on certain sites, shutdown hangs, and slow startup are a universal experience of Firefox users and not an individual support problem. You therefore believe that someone submitting this complaint has no interest in diagnostic steps related to their configuration that might point toward solutions or actionable bugs. You might be right, but I will continue to take the risk that a complaint is a disguised request for help. It takes all kinds.
Please everyone, remember that discussion in Discourse (and all other Mozilla spaces) needs to adhere to the Mozilla CPG.
With all due respect, I’m going to need from you a record of what you deleted and what terms in the CPG were violated. @fminelli
If you type “about:config” into your URL bar, and hit the “refresh” button in the upper right of the screen, that resolves the overwhelming majority of performance issues that Firefox users see.
I’m pinging this thread because there has been no adequate discussion or response about user’s concerns. I am now seeing a number of threads where rather shrill reports of concerns are not addressed; instead they dwindle to nothing. A user takes time to register for this system and, however shrill their complaint, Firefox stewards owe it not only to the OP but likely to thousands or tens of thousands of “me too” users to diligently follow through by discussing how to resolve the problems (rather than offering various flimsy one-off technical band-aids, which appears to be the most that anyone will risk here). Users want change, and a part of that change will need to be for Firefox to go back to previous behavior.
Going through this thread I’m honestly confused as to what’s going on. OP seems to have had some performance issues with Firefox, which you seem to share @pzelchenko ? I’ve also been using Firefox for years now, alongside Firefox Developer Edition, Vivaldi, Chrome, and Edge on a daily basis (I use each one for different purposes).
So far I haven’t personally experienced any performance issues with Firefox at all, compared to Vivaldi or Edge or Chrome, it performs perfectly fine with the rare exception of a website breaking due to adblock or another extension (Which I verify by disabling the extension) so it’s probable that there is some sort of isolated case causing these issues.
So far OP (@kogwonton) has not responded as to whether they tried the suggestions from bjh or jscher2000 so we don’t even know if they found the cause, so this discussion can hardly continue. The issues expressed by OP seem severe, certainly nothing I’ve come across from any browser in the past few years so we really need to hear back from them about this.
I’m 80 years old, and didn’t sign up to be a computer technician. I just want my search engine to work WITHOUT this constant “not responding” message ans stoppage. And I don’t want to try all these suggested solutions that don’t appear to work . Isn’t this a more basic question that Firefox should fix before we all get discouraged and go to another search engine??
Hi Brian, if you need support with Firefox, you can post a question on the Mozilla Support site. They have a team of support volunteers to troubleshoot malfunctions with your Firefox, while this site is pretty quiet these days. Here’s a link to the new question form (for Windows/Mac/Linux): https://mzl.la/3y1vQUQ