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?
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.
Oh man. Many, MANY years ago I had what certainty looks like an identical problem. I actually jumped so for several years because I couldn't stand it any longer and no one could help me. I'm trying to remember what I finally did that solved it, and I'm about 95% sure I had to create a brand new, clean profile. Just reinstalling or refreshing firefox did not do the trick, I had to make a new profile. It was so long ago that I have zero recollection of how to do even that anymore, but if I were you, I'd give it a shot .
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 don't know exactly but it doesn't really surprise me honestly. water may have made an intermittent short (intermittent as in, a million times per second). imagine if a single actual click sent 3 million click signals.
Browsers have js hooks for mouse events. A poorly designed website (or a well designed one) could easily shit itself if you send 3 million clicks before it has processed the first one.
In my case it didn't seem to effect other apps but that may just be because the browser always had the focus whenever something glitched out.
I have no idea if this is likely or even possible but it seems like a plausible way that a mouse could fuck up a browser.
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.
This is really the most important thing to try. A fresh profile with maybe only ublock origin as the only add on. If that is still causing problems then the root issue is probably something else.
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.)
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.
Can you try using a tool like Crystal disk to check your drive health. Once when I had similar symptoms my drive was just weeks from failing completely.
Firefox (in my experience) does seem to lag on some devices especially ones that run older hardware. I have a really old Windows 7 laptop tucked away somewhere that had both Firefox and Chrome installed.
While Chrome runs like a hot knife through butter, I can't say the same about Firefox. I popped open a Windows 8 VM as well and Firefox still seems to run smoothly on that. On my relatively newer laptop, Firefox runs like a breeze.
One of the main culprits might be your hardware (most likely RAM) or your OS.
If the above 2 aren't the issue, then I'd suggest making a new profile with no modifications and see how that runs. If that doesn't work then try using the Firefox Extended Support Release. It's known to be more stable and less frequent to crashes.
Downloaded installer or MSStore? I had an issue for a short time (a single version then it got fixed) where only the Store version caused system stuttering.
Also maybe, you haven't messed with Windows virtual memory page sizing?
Nah it ran just fine on my old 4670K from 2013 running on Windows 8.1 (and then later 10), all the way until last year when I finally built a new PC. No issues whatsoever.
It runs fine on the overwhelming majority of computers, there is zero chances that these issues are widespread for windows users, it would basically mean Firefox is completely broken.
Not a debugging help, but: I have the same issues. Especially the tab thing. Open one, try to open a page, nothing happens. This is especially bad on android for me.
Number 3 is something Firefox has done for ages, even before quantum. It will refuse to start of there is another, non-responding, instance running. I think they actually added a dialog for it that sometimes works.
Number 1 is something I see on Linux every now and then. For me, only the mouse input is ignored then. But sometimes Firefox just hangs without crashing (Probably some loop somewhere went nuts).
I do not have solutions for this. I just want to add, that it probably is not because of OPs system.
For what it's worth FF seems to work just fine with the same extensions on my laptop, which runs Mint. So it's most likely something with my desktop, but I haven't got a clue what.
Do you have an AV running? I know that there was some issues in the past with some AV software causing trouble. (injecting stuff into dlls i think or something)
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.
Do you get any other issues on your pc not related to firefox
Also note down the times the issues occur and look at the event viewer in Windows and look at the times you've noted down to see if you can see anything odd
The ideal way to troubleshoot is to get as much information as you can about the issue before you begin troubleshooting steps
The only other oddity I have is with my mouse. Sometimes it will do some weird thing, and I think it's the brand and it's drivers not being great. I've ordered a new one that should come today, and when it comes I plan on reinstalling windows. If that doesn't fix this... tbh nothing will.
Something that may help with diagnosis is to try a portable version of firefox. If the portable version works properly and your installed version does not then it could be either some setting or library that is having problems.
Would also try running as a different user to see if maybe the issue is with something in your user profile.
The only issue I have with Firefox is on mobile (Android) swiping left or right in Google Image search results is totally broken. It's almost impossible to swipe left or right through the image results
It works fine in DuckDuckGo. I actually just tried it again it in Firefox Nightly and it worked fine. I saw my Firefox Nightly was updated this morning, here's hoping that was a bug they patched?
give nighlty I try on my second old phone were Firefox was not usable is now working quite well (for the old hardware snapdragon 660 and 4 giga of ram )the only sad part is opening or focusing url bar (which still show home )is painfully laggy and slow
I once uninstalled a program that took a library that Firefox was using with it and had similar results. Drove me goddamn mad trying to figure it out. If it’s anything like that, I recommend just going back to chrome, or trying Firefox in a VM to pick it apart if you’re feeling incredibly motivated. Took me days to diagnose and a minute to download the fix.
By god do I wish it had. Reinstalling didn’t bring back the library that my fan temp monitor murder suicided. I had to dissect friggin everything. Eventually it said that “‘insert name here’ stopped working” and I simply redownloaded it from Microsoft. It was strictly extreme obstinance that let me find the answer.
That's because it's a shitty browser with an army of Stan's online. Every time I have tried it over the past 10 years it has been horrible. People just don't like Chromium
Just read the comments here and see the many people with a similar experience. It will never reach higher levels of adoption with the amount of issues it has versus alternatives.