this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Firefox

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Yeah. Do it methodically. And only change one setting / addon at a time or you're never going to figure out the cause.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This reeks of a problem with your system, not Firefox.

Are you using an HDD or SDD?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

SSD.

I'm running an I9-9900K CPU, a GTX4070TI, and have 32gb of ram. I'm pretty certain it isn't a hardware issue...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I'm pretty certain you should run a thorough memtest on your RAM.

Some of the issues you've described are similar to what was happening to me due to unknowingly using RAM with a 64KB bad area on it.

I don't know why Firefox is particularly sensitive to bad-RAM but it is. (Although I did have some of them happen with LibreOffice occasionally, the failure to start for example.)