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why is firefox so unreliable

paulb66
paulb66
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Recently more than ever Firefox lets me down multiple times a day and is becoming unreliable and unusable. I don't know if this is due to a recent update because I never had problems to this extent before. Always problems but not to this degree. I get the blank google page after using the back button which is really annoying but I can cope with that. Then now there's the 'stop plug in' because its not responding page where everything freezes and usually crashes after. And now I get totally unresponsive pages that freeze all the time. Its got to the stage where the little quirks of Firefox are increasing instead of being ironed out and fixed and it has become a hindrance instead of a help. Back to Opera

Recently more than ever Firefox lets me down multiple times a day and is becoming unreliable and unusable. I don't know if this is due to a recent update because I never had problems to this extent before. Always problems but not to this degree. I get the blank google page after using the back button which is really annoying but I can cope with that. Then now there's the 'stop plug in' because its not responding page where everything freezes and usually crashes after. And now I get totally unresponsive pages that freeze all the time. Its got to the stage where the little quirks of Firefox are increasing instead of being ironed out and fixed and it has become a hindrance instead of a help. Back to Opera

All Replies (1)

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 10 Contributor
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Do you like the new Opera, or are you still using the old Opera (12.x)?

Google results page blanking out on "Back"

This was first reported about 11 months ago, and affects users with a zoom level of 130% or higher. A workaround was discovered about two weeks after that report, so you needn't have suffered all this time. Here it is:

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

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

(3) Double-click the browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers preference and change the value from -1 to 0 (that's a zero).

(Please don't change any other similar-sounding settings to 0 or you may disable Firefox's ability to save/restore your open windows and tabs.)

Then reload the problem page. Hopefully after that you won't need to reload the results page ever again.

Plugin not responding

Is it Flash? I don't know if it's available for Windows XP, but Flash is up to version 14 now: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Generally speaking, plugins should not take down Firefox completely like that because they are (usually) isolated in the plugin-container.exe process. Some users have set an environment variable to force Firefox to run plugins "in-process" instead of using plugin-container.exe. If you have done that, you could experiment with undoing it to see whether that helps keep plugin crashes from crashing Firefox.

Pages freezing

There are many possible reasons for this, so without details, it is hard to advise. You could check this support article for general suggestions: Firefox hangs or is not responding - How to fix.

Modified by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer