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Firefox @lemmy.ml Landrin201 @lemmy.ml

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:

  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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  • Any crash logs in about:crashes ?

    Other resources:

    • Nope, none at all. It's like FF doesn't recognize that it's crashing.

      • 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)

        • Nope, just Windows Defender, I think other AVs are just as bad as malware.

          • Ok, if you have no other software that could interfere, i would suggest next to take a look into the Windows Event Manager/Logger and see if you can find anything there at the time when the issue happen(ed/s)

            • I found one that seems interesting:

              The program firefox.exe version 115.0.3.8607 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel.
 Process ID: 53b4
 Start Time: 01d9c57c9d42f8ed
 Termination Time: 6
 Application Path: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
 Report Id: 27a4cc4a-08e6-4c65-b42b-62f1fb26351a
 Faulting package full name: 
 Faulting package-relative application ID: 
 Hang type: Unknown

              But I don't see any other logs around that incident. I also don't see other, similar entries- that log is from yesterday, and I've had a couple of crashes today already that I don't see showing up in the log.

              I don't see anything in Security and Maintenance either, it just shows the same log as above.

              I checked the firewall and noticed something odd; Windows seems to think there is a second installation of Firefox on one of my other drives. No idea why though, I can't find any evidence of it there...

              • Very strange that not all crashes are recorded ... makes it seem like there isnt just one issue ... but maybe different ones.

                Could you please try and install the Firefox ESR version ... and see if that behaves the same way? Just so we have a bit more data on when/how the problem happens. Report back with your findings.

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