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?

  • jetAEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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

    • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      1 year ago

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

  • DarkThoughts@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    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.

  • heavyboots@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Landrin201@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      NGL I haven’t considered this yet; it IS feasible though, I’d just have to make a bootable ISO drive and dig up my product key which is buried… somewhere.

      I’ll consider doing that if I can’t find anything else to fix this but I’d rather not.

    • Landrin201@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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…

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        1·
        1 year 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.)

      • Scary le Poo@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Ctrl+shift+esc

        Performance tab

        Click on memory

        What speed is listed on that tab for your memory? Actually a screenshot of this would be way better.

        In the meantime, grab revo uninstaller and uninstall Firefox with it, making sure to nix all found files and registry keys associated with it.

        Are you running AV besides windows defender? If you are, uninstall that junk too and reenable windows defender.

        • Landrin201@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          The memory speed is 3600mHz, I don’t think the ram is the problem…

          As I said elsewhere, I don’t use any other AV other than Windows Defender. The others are all just malware in disguise.

            • Landrin201@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              So I ended up reinstalling windows, and that seems to have fixed the problems. Not really sure what was causing it in the end; if they start happening again I’ll post something here. Thanks for the help!

              • Scary le Poo@beehaw.orgEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                I’m glad you got it sorted! I really wish we could have figured out what was going on but hopefully reinstalling solves any other issues that that one issue might have been causing in the background.

                Cheers!

  • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Landrin201@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      01·
      1 year ago

      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.