Author Topic: Firefox windows and CPU slow-downs and restarts (Read 25,433 times)

Steven Avery · « **on:** October 23, 2014, 05:06 PM »

I like Firefox, the extensions are a big deal.

If I open a lot of windows, which I do, it does not take long for CPU to slow me up, even without any youtube type of stuff. Then the simplest solution is to kill Firefox and restart. I do use Session Manager, which is pretty good. Sometimes I start fresh, sometimes I bring up the same windows, (it seems like Firefox has improved and does not automatically try to activate all of them, waiting for you to hit the tab.)

In the long run I have a few solutions.

Close a window quickly. (not my normal way of operation for stuff I am thinking about)

Live with it. It's my fault for opening 50 tabs, 20 or so in a couple of windows each. Just kill it and start over.

Check my Windows. Oh, my main puter is XP, If I go to my Windows 7 it will be better ... or not.

Get an Apple Mini-mac. It has a real OS and will comfortably take care of a gazillion. Maybe.

Read all the Firefox memory and performance tips and extensions. All the answers are right there.

Which ones of these make the most sense? Which have worked for you?

Thanks!

Steven Avery

eleman · « **Reply #1 on:** October 23, 2014, 05:09 PM »

Don't use any unnecessary add-ons.
Use flashblock (or firefox's built-in function).
Restart firefox. Restart early, restart often. This may help.
Last but not least, don't use ajax-heavy sites (i.e. gmail) on firefox. Use a dedicated browser such as IE for them.

mouser · « **Reply #2 on:** October 23, 2014, 05:28 PM »

i have almost given up on firefox because of its slowdowns.
what eleman says is basically the only solution: restart firefox often.
there is no other solution.

eleman · « **Reply #3 on:** October 23, 2014, 05:32 PM »

Don't underestimate the power of casting off gmail to another browser. It really helps.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #4 on:** October 23, 2014, 06:30 PM »

I thought it was just me.

Usually I have no more than 8 or 9 tabs running. But I notice stuff like hotmail is glacial. I click an entry in my inbox and twiddle my thumbs waiting for it to show as selected. Scrolling is often weird too. Herky jerky delays.

This is all with no animation or videos playing. Not even audio.

Latest Cyberfox x64 but FF Portable does the same.

40hz · « **Reply #5 on:** October 23, 2014, 07:03 PM »

I haven't found FF version 28.0 (running on Linux) to be all that bad. About the only sites that give it occasional grief are the usual suspects: YouTube/GMail/Hotmail. Everything else generally works well including Amazon. Running FF on Windows 7 Pro is a different story. The Windows version of FF is almost unusable IMO. I've since switched to IE when in Windows. (When in Rome as the saying goes.)

tomos · « **Reply #6 on:** October 23, 2014, 07:12 PM »

Yeah, Firefox has been a problem on win7 x64 here for a long time now. (And I gave up on PaleMoon x64 completely cause it just took over.)
Lately it's been very slow after startup, so I just leave it a minute or two.

I restart it every day - & also use Session Manager - you can set it to show a list of sessions on startup, your choice then which to go with.

Steven Avery · « **Reply #7 on:** October 23, 2014, 08:28 PM »

Thanks great responses.

It sounds like Windows 7 is the same basic situation.

As for the alternate browser, I always have that in theory, now in practice I think I will deputize google for ..
a) gmail
b) listhings (my personal notes online, google keep +++)
c) maybe radio, I use Live365 and some others, and at times utube.

Nice, simple 3 to 5 stable items out of the way, 2 of them that could crunch firefox. The notes makes sense because you can always find the window quickly with a single click or two. (Since Google will only have one window open with 3-5 tabs.)

I had put little Firefox kill button on the right, using PsKill and a shortcut, and with MaxMax it was never covered so can get there even when things are real slowww .. I'll add the internal restart extension too, just for variety.

Big question. I was at MicroCenter (some of those places are pretty sharp in my experience) and was playing on their MiniMac (I do have an Airpad so Macs are not so foreign) and it was very nice. The salesman said his Firefox experience was tons better on the Mac, in terms of this problem. Anybody able to verify, or not?

Steven

dr_andus · « **Reply #8 on:** October 23, 2014, 10:45 PM »

Quote from: Steven Avery on October 23, 2014, 08:28 PM

As for the alternate browser, I always have that in theory, now in practice I think I will deputize google for ..
a) gmail
b) listhings (my personal notes online, google keep +++)
c) maybe radio, I use Live365 and some others, and at times utube.

I use this strategy (using Google services such as Google Calendar, Drive, Sheets etc. in Chrome, and using Firefox for everything else). But I've been finding that Chrome runs a lot of processes in the background, which I presume also must be some drain on resources (RAM)?

E.g. currently I have 4 tabs open in Chrome, one Chrome app (WorkFlowy) running, and the Google Drive off-line sync client, yet there are 25 instances of chrome.exe processes running, each using different amounts of RAM... I can't tell what they are, unfortunately.

bit · « **Reply #9 on:** October 24, 2014, 01:00 AM »

On certain websites I frequent that I know will try to load a lot of stuff, I watch the side slider until it jumps from long to short, count quickly to 3, and click on 'Stop' in the Navigation bar to cut off extra junk loading up.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #10 on:** October 24, 2014, 10:37 AM »

I'm running Cyberfox x64 on Windows 8.0 x64. If I had a lot of email to handle it would be unusable. As it is it's mostly receipts for purchases or notices from forums. Even so it's click and wait to the max. I've been using hotmail since before MS bought it. So I don't think I'll abandon it. Just for grins I'll have to try with Opera x64 andd see how it responds.

Edit: Opera is snappy. For some reason though every time I click a mail it shows the context menu, then opens it. There's no lag though.

famewolf · « **Reply #11 on:** October 26, 2014, 05:30 PM »

You might take a look at the "Suspend Tab" extension which auto hibernates tabs at a user configurable time setting....I've found it has stopped me from having to restart firefox when I have 30 tabs open I don't wanna close.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/

bababooey · « **Reply #12 on:** October 26, 2014, 10:39 PM »

I've been looking around intermittently for solutions to pokey FF performance and this is the only place I found useful information. Thanks guys!

Skrell · « **Reply #13 on:** October 27, 2014, 01:10 PM »

I would also recommend trying Palemoon which i've noticed performs much better on XP than the latest FF. The only issue might be the latest version of Palemoon broke a bunch of extensions. :-/

MilesAhead · « **Reply #14 on:** October 29, 2014, 03:26 PM »

Just for grins I'm trying 33.02 installed Firefox 32 bit. Hotmail seems snappier. But moving the vertical scroll bar is still horrid. It keeps snapping to the top if new content is added. It's like I have to fight it.

I'll see how it goes.

kenmuse · « **Reply #15 on:** October 31, 2014, 12:18 AM »

When I started using Firefox regularly a few years ago I did find it slowed down and would crash when I had a lot of tabs open. Over time it has improved. But I noticed a real speed improvement when I installed extensions "Ad Block Plus" and "Do Not Track Me" - I think the reason is that Ads and tracking are loaded and take time and memory. I use Session Manger and was using TabGroups Manager - would sometimes get up to 500 tabs open and I did not feel it slow down - I do have 16GB of memory and an i7 processor. Now did it crash occasionally - yes and that is why to use Session Manger and save backups regularly. I do push the number limit it seems with tabs. Recently my Firefox crashed and would not open so I created a new profile and reloaded my extensions and am now trying Tab Mix Plus. I do find the need to group is necessary. TabGroups Manager is good I like that it gives a number count for each tab group and Tab Mix Plus does not. Tab Mix Plus gives a lot more control over tab and toolbar appearance also. open tab count widget gives a total count of tabs open. Caution - you may have some trouble, like me, playing audio or video sometimes - if I trust the site I will unblock it in Do Not Track Me, sometimes I have to copy the url and open it in another browser that is not blocking.

eleman · « **Reply #16 on:** October 31, 2014, 09:51 AM »

Quote from: kenmuse on October 31, 2014, 12:18 AM

When I started using Firefox regularly a few years ago I did find it slowed down and would crash when I had a lot of tabs open. Over time it has improved. But I noticed a real speed improvement when I installed extensions "Ad Block Plus" and "Do Not Track Me" - I think the reason is that Ads and tracking are loaded and take time and memory. I use Session Manger and was using TabGroups Manager - would sometimes get up to 500 tabs open and I did not feel it slow down - I do have 16GB of memory and an i7 processor. Now did it crash occasionally - yes and that is why to use Session Manger and save backups regularly. I do push the number limit it seems with tabs. Recently my Firefox crashed and would not open so I created a new profile and reloaded my extensions and am now trying Tab Mix Plus. I do find the need to group is necessary. TabGroups Manager is good I like that it gives a number count for each tab group and Tab Mix Plus does not. Tab Mix Plus gives a lot more control over tab and toolbar appearance also. open tab count widget gives a total count of tabs open. Caution - you may have some trouble, like me, playing audio or video sometimes - if I trust the site I will unblock it in Do Not Track Me, sometimes I have to copy the url and open it in another browser that is not blocking.

Using paragraphs can also help

Anyway, I also agree with you, that adblocking helps with memory consumption.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #17 on:** November 02, 2014, 01:11 PM »

So far Firefox 33.02 installed 32 bit for Windows is much snappier in Hotmail. Of course it will still bog if I'm loading 8 or 9 tabs with Tab Grenade.

I'm curious. Has anyone tried FF portable out of a Ramdisk? I tried it in the past for faster launching. But I didn't try it as a solution/work-around for bogging once loaded.

Edit: Here's the guide I used if anyone is curious:
http://www.wikihow.com/Speed-Up-Firefox-by-Running-It-In-RAM

I found it better to load from a FF Portable on disk as shown in the guide. For modifications, such as installing a new AddOn I would just run from the HD. Saving changes by saving the Ramdisk image on shutdown seemed too cumbersome to me when I could just dump it and load on next boot from the FF Portable folder tree.

ilikefree09 · « **Reply #18 on:** November 13, 2014, 02:30 PM »

I was having my FF cache on ram and that seemed to help but because I don't have a lot of ram I switched back to keeping it on the disc.
It was after reading it could be better if you use a SSD that I tried it
It did make things load faster though

tomos · « **Reply #19 on:** November 18, 2014, 10:51 AM »

Firefox got really bad in the last couple of weeks here - tabs became unclickable, the one to the right would get focus; had to restart very often as it would eventually just sieze up & the plugin container would crash (Flash would also crash occasionally, but that's always been a problem I find).
So I started it without plugins and it worked fine [Click the menu button =>, click help => and select Restart with Add-ons Disabled.... Firefox will start up with the Firefox Safe Mode dialog.]

So I restarted and disabled all the add-ons I thought I could do without.
It's working very nicely so far, the usual memory consumption, will have to wait see how long it takes to goe overboard. CPU usage is almost nil (tbh I didnt check what it was before).

I didnt bother trying to figure out exactly which add-on was causing the problem/s.
(BTW is there any way of exporting a list of add-ons?)

EDIT// Version 33.1

MilesAhead · « **Reply #20 on:** November 18, 2014, 11:30 AM »

I noticed on the 33.1.1 release notes it has stuff about selection delay and focus problems still unresolved. 33.1.1 seemed flakier than 33.1 so I went back to 33.02 since I had the installer already. Hotmail reacts better than using 33.1.1.

eleman · « **Reply #21 on:** November 18, 2014, 11:37 AM »

Really, stay on Firefox ESR.

We're no longer 20-somethings, let someone else be the beta tester. You (I mean me) have less time remaining to spend on this planet, and troubleshooting a new version of web browser every 6 weeks or so is not something I intend to do.

ed.: "the" use for non-native speakers.

IainB · « **Reply #22 on:** November 18, 2014, 01:18 PM »

Quote from: eleman on November 18, 2014, 11:37 AM

Really, stay on Firefox ESR.
We're no longer 20-somethings, let someone else be the beta tester. You (I mean me) have less time remaining to spend on this planet, and troubleshooting a new version of web browser every 6 weeks or so is not something I intend to do.
ed.: "the" use for non-native speakers.

+1 for that. I too reckon that we each probably have better things to spend our cognitive surplus on than fiddling about with misbehaving browsers.
However, I have remained on the FF beta channel because it doesn't seem to require my attention. If FF slows down, then, to speed things up a bit, I periodically run CCleaner, and that clears out or compresses the main browser caches. Seems to work for a while.

40hz · « **Reply #23 on:** November 18, 2014, 01:19 PM »

FF 33.0 on Linux is a constant annoyance. Big initial lags (15-20 secs) getting some sites to load. And Amazon is getting to be unusable. Constant timeouts. Sometimes after only a few seconds. Switching to Chrome, I don't see any of this.

I suspect their new ad serving revenue scheme has something to do with it.

eleman · « **Reply #24 on:** November 18, 2014, 02:59 PM »

Really, truly, sincerely... Firefox ESR.