Latest firefox, 57.0, unusably unresponsive on Win10
The latest firefox 57.0 installed itself as an update on Win10. It is virtually unusable because it is extremely unresponsive. It's rather like the first generation GUI apps which at times would take minutes to respond to an operation.
I've started it up in safe mode: not much better. I used the accessiblity.force_disabled=1 trick from the forum: better but still horrible in safe mode.
Something is grabbing control of the process and holding it for extended periods of time. While this is happening even the controls won't highlight as I hover over them. The mouse wheel will not scroll the display. Menus won't drop or if dropped won't highlight the current item under the cursor.
Eventually (which can be a long time) it will break free for a little bit. The task manager shows firefox not using too much CPU (12% on a four core system) nor much memory (1/3 GB). My guess is that one of the threads is failing to release a lock which keeps the other threads from working despite their being system resources available. Eventually the offending thread finishes the operation or starts another and in that path releases the thread then all is well until the next time; the window of responsiveness only seems to last for a few seconds.
Chosen solution
thanks, you have a user.js file in your profile which is usually a bad sign because adware is commonly using this to override your user settings.
please try to refresh firefox and then run a scan of your system with different security tools like the free version of malwarebytes & adwcleaner, which are specialised in adware and browser hijackers and see if the situation improves.
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hi, could you go to the firefox menu ≡ > help ? > troubleshooting information, copy the contents of that page and paste them here into a reply on the forum (or if it's too long through a site like https://pastebin.mozilla.org/ and provide the link here)?
this might give us a clue what is going on. thank you!
Here's one back in safe-mode: https://pastebin.mozilla.org/9073102
Chosen Solution
thanks, you have a user.js file in your profile which is usually a bad sign because adware is commonly using this to override your user settings.
please try to refresh firefox and then run a scan of your system with different security tools like the free version of malwarebytes & adwcleaner, which are specialised in adware and browser hijackers and see if the situation improves.
Modified by philipp
Nuking user.js did seem to help, though I recheck that is was unresponsive this morning before I slagged it. There didn't seem to be much in there, but one line can do it and the file itself was about 6 years old.
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe") user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe") user_pref("yahoo.homepage.dontask", true);
Thanks for the help. I was having to use Chrome and since I'm unfamiliar with it it was a real pain, plus it didn't have any of my history, bookmarks or saved passwords.