Firefox is badly broken for me, and I've never been able to figure out why
Firefox is badly broken for me, and I've never been able to figure out why
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?
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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.
More of a binary chop really.
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…
That's how VS Code bisect works to narrow down problematic extensions.
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.