I Googled "weather.com won't load" and found a Firefox forum suggestion about location tracking. It had about:config stuff, which turned out to be already set where they recommended. But, with 57.0's new, as it seems, security settings portal, I found I'd denied weather.com and Google.com my location. I turned both on, weather.com's three tabs on my home page loaded, although the local forecast took the longest, and now, on my third trial, it's still pinging back and forth. RAM usage is up to 5600 MB. Maybe this is all normal, and I'd just reset that about:config change you recommended back to what it had been. Maybe it's only the pinging balls that tells me all the ads aren't finished loading that's changed. The local forecast is the most elaborate of the three pages, with a satellite/radar map that updates a lot and a lot of videos to choose from. Ooops, it just hung up. I'll put your change back into effect. Well the last pinging stopped, and I assume superfetch is cleaning up the mess, which will take a couple of minutes. Twenty minutes of grinding away and it's still bogging down. I kept it open so I could finish this. Changing acc-force-dis midstream not a good idea. The disk light was on constantly for a half hour or so, I finally cut Firefox off at the task manager. Smoke rolling out of the tower, not quite. Here I go to test it again. I'm using IE this time to post this. It resumed where cut off, so I exited and opened. This time the local forecast and hourly won't finish loading, and it just bogged. Back where I started. An hour later: I discovered Firefox has "stop loading" buttons that seem to really work. I'll just cut off the weather.com pages once they've got what I need to see. And maybe the sooner I do this, the less RAM usage and bogginess, like in typing, I'll get. This time when I exited Firefox, task manager showed both RAM and disk usage went almost to zero immediately. No "superfetch clean-up" or whatnot. So I made progress on several fronts. Half hour later: next trial, I stopped loading of the two weather.com sites when RAM usage reached 2000 or so, left it for ten minutes, came back and RAM usage had risen to 6000 and things were on the verge of bogging down. And after exiting normally, Firefox hung on, not up in Apps (in task manager) but down in "background processes" for a couple of minutes, and then the computer needed a bit more time to entirely recover its poise. Every time it's different. It's alive, it's alive. Artificial Ignorance, no, it's mostly, well, I'm sure it's entirely logical. General rule, call it the AOL rule: you pay the price for not going with the herd. Another experiment: just the weather.com local forecast page on IE 11, current version. The RAM started out at 200 or so, climbed up to 700 in a few minutes. Now, does IE have my permission to give my location? Not according to Google maps, though I gave IE all the permission I could.

DocCovington said

P.S. on the new design:

• Flat grey folder icons make reading the favorites less comfortable.

• The old FF icon was so much prettier. The new one looks cartoony.

• I want to be able to choose the look of my "New tab" home page (I prefer the big preview windows of the pinned sites from before).

• In general, let people choose between the beautiful old design and the simplistic (and downright ugly) new design, thank you.

On the first one, you can color the folders or replace them with the old icons using a custom style rule. See: https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-css.html#colorbookmarkfolder

On the third one, you can revert to the old layout by disabling the Activity Stream design:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful or accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste newt and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled preference to switch the value from true to false (if you have a new tab page open, reload it to see the change)

On the fourth one, you'll need to customize using userChrome.css for now until extensions are given more ability to modify the toolbar area (maybe by next Summer?).

jscher2000 said

DocCovington said

P.S. on the new design:

• Flat grey folder icons make reading the favorites less comfortable.

• The old FF icon was so much prettier. The new one looks cartoony.

• I want to be able to choose the look of my "New tab" home page (I prefer the big preview windows of the pinned sites from before).

• In general, let people choose between the beautiful old design and the simplistic (and downright ugly) new design, thank you.

On the first one, you can color the folders or replace them with the old icons using a custom style rule. See: https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-css.html#colorbookmarkfolder

On the third one, you can revert to the old layout by disabling the Activity Stream design:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful or accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste newt and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled preference to switch the value from true to false (if you have a new tab page open, reload it to see the change)

On the fourth one, you'll need to customize using userChrome.css for now until extensions are given more ability to modify the toolbar area (maybe by next Summer?).

Thank you! <3 I will wait for the next release version of FF, though, because this one seems a bit experimental and buggy still. Then I will follow your suggestions. :)

I have already created an .ico of the old FF icon for use with future releases, too.

Edit: I just noticed that I already have the value set to "false", but it still showed me the mini-preview windows in FF 57 instead of the old larger preview windows. :-/ Actitivty stream refers only to the additional content, doesn't it? That's not what I was talking about.

P.S. OT: As a fan of the film "Aliens", "newt" made me smile. ;)

For those with limited RAM causing slowdowns in FF quantum (v57), you might want to try the add-on One Tab which can reduce Firefox 57's memory usage by 20-30% or more. See more at https://www.one-tab.com/

I have 32 Gb of RAM installed and v57 is still no good for me.

jmajacobs said

I have 32 Gb of RAM installed and v57 is still no good for me.

Hi jmajacobs, if the steps in this already-long thread didn't help, please start a new question and provide your Firefox and system info:

https://support.mozilla.org/questions/new/desktop/fix-problems

Scroll down past article suggestions to continue with submitting the form. If you can submit your question using Firefox, there is a Share Data feature to ease the process of providing requested information.

It really helped yesterday, my ten tabs of home pages loaded completely and RAM usage went up to about 2K. Today RAM usage went up to 5K, one tab (weather.com, the holdouts, I have three tabs of them as home pages) needed a stop (x) and reload to completely load, and now finally it's starting to not respond. My typing this broke the camel's back. I type something and it takes five or ten seconds to appear. Now it's faster. RAM usage now up to 6K. This browser is learning how to crash despite all obstacles put in its way. So I gather this is a serious systemic problem, new to version 57, not responding. After a while some of what I typed appeared, the end of it got lost.

Howiem, this is me again, from above. I think I installed onetab but never deployed it. I just noticed the funnel ikon on Firefox, upper right corner, next to the "open menu" ikon. I clicked on it, and instead of one Firefox page with ten tabs, my normal home page, opening, it showed just one tab with the ten websites listed, and, possibly, it is telling me I can look at any or all of them I want ("restore"). Is that what "onetab" does? I tried "restore all" to see if Firefox would once again go rushing off into several 1000s of MBs of RAM and end up in "not responding". What exactly is onetab supposed to do, to accomplish?

Howdy....don't know if it's been mentioned but I stumbled onto something called Waterfox https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ which, so far is working great for me. It auto imports all of your firefox add-ons and has not yet bogged down or frozen as Firefox has frequently done during the last few months. Looks just like firefox before 57.

My main reason for using firefox was Aeon Jumbo which gives large icons which makes the toolbar and bookmarks bar easier to see and use with a touchscreen. Without that, firefox would not be useful to me. Hopefully Waterfox will last a long time as it is.

Howiem, this is me again, from above. I think I installed onetab but never deployed it. I just noticed the funnel ikon on Firefox, upper right corner, next to the "open menu" ikon. I clicked on it, and instead of one Firefox page with ten tabs, my normal home page, opening, it showed just one tab with the ten websites listed, and, possibly, it is telling me I can look at any or all of them I want ("restore"). Is that what "onetab" does? I tried "restore all" to see if Firefox would once again go rushing off into several 1000s of MBs of RAM and end up in "not responding". What exactly is onetab supposed to do, to accomplish?

Okay, I opened Firefox, hit the funnel ikon, saw the one tab with my ten home pages listed, clicked "restore all", went away for five minutes, and RAM usage is moving up through the 5000s as two weather.com pages won't complete loading, which is where version 57 breaks down on me. So one-tab just puts off the misery. Or it lets me do what I do anyway now when I open Firefox: I start with the recalcitrant weather.com tabs, get a look at them before they finish loading (all those ads and videos, whatever hangs up), close them, ending up, after those fast scans, with the home pages I have to study more carefully and which don't gobble up RAM. The nice thing about ten tabs of home pages is I can flit back and forth, which I could do on the older versions of Firefox.

chrisrushlau The point of One Tab is not to keep open all the tabs we might be using, but to keep open only the tabs we need at a given moment. If you require having many tabs open simultaneously, and if those web sites are RAM hogs, then One Tab will not help you. But let me run through how it functions You probably already enabled (deployed) One Tab in Tools| Add-ons, and in addition to the icon at the upper right, you should also have a tab at the far left called One Tab. At the upper right of that tab, you will see a link called Bring all tabs into OneTab Here's an experiment to try: 1.Open about 5 tabs in addition to One Tab 2. Open Task Manager and at the bottom note the amount of Physical memory in use 3. Go to the One Tab tab and click the link at the upper right called Bring all tabs into OneTab 4. All the tabs (except One Tab) that were open will now appear in One Tab as links, and all other tabs will have been closed. .

When you clicked restore all, you defeated the purpose of One Tab, since it is designed to reduce memory use by closing tabs that use memory. 5. Look at Task Manager again, and you will see a noticeable reduction in the amount of Physical memory used. 6. If you want to open a tab from a link, if you click the link in One Tab the link will disappear from One Tab and open in a new tab. But if you want to open the link and have the One Tab tab retain that link, use the right click "Open Link in New tab" function. You can adjust this behavior in One Tab options, where you can tell One Tab to eliminate duplicates in the list silently.

I only have 2.9GB RAM available. I have noticed that when my memory usage exceeds 90% then Firefox 57 starts to slow down.

To illustrate, I opened enough tabs to get memory usage up to a little over 90%. I then clicked the link in One Tab Bring all tabs into OneTab and my physical memory decreased to 60%.of the links in the One Tab tab,

Right now One Tab does not allow for adding one link at a time, but by having a list of frequently used links in the One Tab tab, you can close a tab and still have the link available to open it again quickly.

Reading a bit hastily, let me add one thing. After my 8 gigs of RAM have gotten used up to about 6K MB on task manager, FF stops responding, and then, after I close FF, it takes my computer 5 or 10 minutes to recover, to clean up ("superfetch"?), to where disk usage drops back to the normal single digits level. So thank you: one-tab lets me have all ten tabs on tap as it were, but if I open them all, I defeat its purpose.

chrisrushlau

I have found that I can speed up the shutdown time in FF57 by manually doing an end process in Task Manager for each instance of firefox.exe. Firefox still recovers all tabs when restarted.

There is another add-on called memory tab usage that unfortunately does not work with FF57 - it showed the RAM usage in a corner of the tab, which made it easier to see which tabs to close.

I don't understand why weather.com was causing grief, though, since I opened it and it only used about 1-2% RAM. It is usually video sites that use the most RAM

So I'm probably accusing weather.com unfairly, aside from their giving me good service for free. I'll try the task manager "end process" instead of using the drop-down menu for "exit". Thank you.

hhh222 said

Howdy....don't know if it's been mentioned but I stumbled onto something called Waterfox https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ which, so far is working great for me. .

This is the first advice I've gotten on this question that actually seems to work.

Waterfox is only for 64 bit systems.

Right, I noticed that.

I have now uninstalled Firefox 57 and instead installed 52.5.2 version. All is well so far... I think the frequency of FF updates are far too frequent and sometimes I wonder if they are at all necessary. Despite not being a Chrome person, I now have it on standby in case I get issues with Firefox which is still my favourite browser. But for the love of God, do not issue updates if you are not sure about it. Like all the other contributors, I thought there was something wrong with my PC. Now I see I am not the only one having this problem version 57. I have always updated FF with blind faith. Now, after this experience, I will not update it automatically.

howiem said

For those with limited RAM causing slowdowns in FF quantum (v57), you might want to try the add-on One Tab which can reduce Firefox 57's memory usage by 20-30% or more. See more at https://www.one-tab.com/

So, in effect, this is admission that FF 57 is RAM intensive. I have had so many freezes and hang ups with the new version that by just adding a Tab extension 20-30% reduction in RAM usage is not really much. We can't be expected to upgrade our computers because Mozilla did not think about such eventualities with their latest browser. I have now downgraded to a lower version of FF and having no issues. Is Mozilla now working on another update for the troublesome version 57? Dont get me wrong: I am a dedicated user of FF but can't do with all these freezes and hang-ups... Sorry Mozilla.

"So, in effect, this is admission that FF 57 is RAM intensive." Not necessarily, as a participant on this forum (I don't work for Mozilla), I am saying that no matter how much RAM you are using, you can reduce it with the One-Tab add-on.

"So, in effect, this is admission that FF 57 is RAM intensive." Exactly right.

You put these technical troubles (I have changed over to Waterfox from a suggestion in this string and it hasn't hiccuped once) together with the recent flurry of corporate "get out the vote" activity, trying to enlist users in forums and support groups, all of which seem to be entirely devoted to getting organized, i.e., learning to toe the party line with joy in your heart, and you have a diagnosis of Mozilla that doesn't depend on rumors about financial condition or the like.