Today I updated to Firefox 40.0 for iOS and its completely frozen every time I launch it.
Background:
I had over 200 tabs open when I upgraded. Every few days I sort t… (read more)
Today I updated to Firefox 40.0 for iOS and its completely frozen every time I launch it.
Background:
I had over 200 tabs open when I upgraded. Every few days I sort through my open tabs and send those that I want to preserve to Pinboard. Although I am due to clean up tabs, this has never been a problem with previous Firefox upgrades.
In its current state Firefox is holding several important topics I was looking up hostage. I can’t just delete and reinstall the app because I don’t know that I will be able to find those pages again.
Expectation:
When I start Firefox for iOS I expect it to open the last tab I was on and allow me to interact with normal Firefox controls like entering the tab menu or typing in the URL bar.
Reality:
Everything is completely frozen. The most recent tab opens but it stuck with the purple loading bar 1/3 to 1/2 full. I cannot interact with any of the application controls such as opening menus or interacting with the URL bar. Firefox usually crashes to springboard after a minute or two if I wait for it to load.
I’ve tried
- Force quit. This doesn’t change anything.
- Phone restart. When I restart my phone Firefox works for about 30 seconds but rapidly slows and freezes.
- Closing tabs. I’ve restarted my phone and closes a few tabs until Firefox stops responding. I’ve done this enough times to close about 40 tabs. It’s made virtually no impact.
- Other browser. I’ve tested some of the same websites that are giving me trouble on Safari and they load quickly. I do not appear to have connectivity issues nor do the websites that I am loading.
- Disabling external privacy features. I use AdGuard Pro as well as NextDNS to improve privacy and speed when I browse. I have disabled both services but it did not improve Firefox’s performance.
I’ve also noticed that, when I can get to the tabs pag, all the thumbnails have disappeared and been replaced with favicons. This suggests to me that perhaps Firefox emptied some kind of internal cache when it was upgraded. That said, historically if I clear the browsing cache with hundreds of tabs open I don’t have any sort of problem like this.
I will install screenshots in a follow-up to this post — I need to restart my phone to make them and I don’t want to lose what I’ve typed here. :-)
Final Thoughts: Firefox and Apple both encourage frequently updating apps. If Mozilla wishes to maintain a rapid update cycle it is critical that they do not introduce breaking changes. It is not reasonable for a user to “migrate” to a new version when they have (a) no means for rollback and (b) updates are either forced or hard to avoid.
Please help me resolve this so I can save the tabs that I need without information loss.
