Firefox Community Forum

Hello All,

I seem to have a problem with Firefox freezing. I moved back again to Firefox to maintain the adblockers that Chrome so graciously crippled.

Now, with that out of the way, I noticed that sites that have autoplaying MPEG-4 files that basically act like good old-fashioned gifs tend to cause the firefox to freeze.

It is a strange freeze though - the whole browser becomes VISUALLY unresponsive, but if I click blindly, say to close the tab or if I scroll up or down it appears to work. How do I know? Well, if I drag the mouse to the bottom of the taskbar in Windows and bring up the thumbnail... It unfreezes the browser - showing the changes I made blindly, at least until it freezes again when the MPEG-4 files start playing again. The freezes are not temporary either - I need to unfreeze through this thumbnail method I described above - otherwise it stays frozen.

The issue is not consistent either. Sometimes it goes through the MPEG-4 files perfectly fine, but usually scrolling through any thread containing embedded MPEG-4 videos, like reaction clips and the like, is literally impossible due to the rate of freezes.

Furthermore - this issue does not seem to occur when MPEG-4 videos are embedded on site itself, but freezes occur when the files appear in comments on imageboards and such.

I have narrowed down the culprit - the issues ceases when I disable the hardware acceleration, but I do not find it to be an acceptable solution in a long term - because disabling it causes various videos to play at noticeably lower and unpleasant framerates.

I'm fairly convinced it is NOT a hardware or software issue on my end - it is a brand new and powerful PC with a fresh install of Windows 11 and all the drivers are up to date, AMD GPU. Unless the issue is with some obscure codec, perhaps. However, the issue does not persist on any other browser I used.

Firefox freezes when I try to sign into YouTube via Google. Becomes totally unresponsive and I have to close browser. It's the only site this happens on. I have cleared the cache and cookies, unchecked "Hardware Acceleration" and other recommendations from other posts. Please talk to me like I'm your Baby Boomer dad.

When I click the Firefox icon on my taskbar, it apparently starts OK, but in a second or so the window dims (See first attached image). This window doesn't allow any typed input anywhere, and doesn't close when I click the X in the upper left. This window can be made to go away either by using the Task Manager or by right-clicking on the taskbar icon and selecting Close Window.

However, if I right-click the taskbar icon and select Open New Window, the resulting window appears undimmed (Second attached image) and works correctly.

The above behavior is new; I've used Firefox for years with no problem.

The other user on this machine doesn't see this behavior at all.

Hi, I’ve noticed that Firefox often uses a lot of memory when I have multiple tabs open, even more than Chrome or Edge on the same number of tabs. Sometimes it slows down my system or makes switching between tabs laggy.

Is this normal behavior, or is there a way to reduce Firefox’s RAM usage without losing performance? Are there specific settings, add-ons, or troubleshooting steps I should try?

Thanks in advance!

OS: Linux Recently, firefox has been annoying me with not closing a tab when I click the X like normal. I have to right click and close it, or press ctrl w. I am unable to move tabs around, as well. I am not sure since when this next bit has been happening, but I am also unable to interact with many elements of the top bar. The only thing of the firefox ui besides the websites themselves that let me interact with them at the moment is the home button, the new tab button, bookmarked sites, and that box icon on the left corner that lets you look at previously closed tabs. My Firefox's version should around, I believe it is 140.5.0 ESR. Thank you in advance. Update: Upon a restart of firefox, it appears to be working again as normal.. However, the bit with tabs not closing when the X is clicked and not being able to move tabs around has been happening multiple previous times, and it may come back. Update again: The issue does come back after some usage. I'm using KDE plasma with Wayland. I will try what the answer asked, and come back later. Update: This seems to happen very randomly and is not reproducible for me.. It will go a few days being fine, then randomly freeze again. Has not happened under another user, at least not yet.

Windows 11. I have my taskbar behaviour set to ‘Automatically hide the Taskbar’ So usually the Taskbar is not displayed, but when I move my cursor to the bottom of the screen it reappears. With Firefox I cannot make the Taskbar reappear.

Every couple of minutes Firefox just freezes. YouTube buffers, all open tabs just stop working. I can open new tabs but i cannot search up anything or go into any websites. Is there any fix for this?

What causes Firefox to freeze when two video windows are opened, i.e. in a new tab, the video windows immediately start to freeze? I use Windows 11. Other browsers work fine, only Firefox freezes with two windows open.

This started happening a few days ago.

I tried to drag a tab out of the main window to put it in its own window on my other monitor, but the tab just became unselectable, and if i scrolled in the tab bar, the tab icon and text would remain locked in place in the display while the other tabs moved behind it.

The main Firefox window also lost the minimize, restore, and close buttons. The only way to make the tabs work was to close Firefox and relaunch it.

I noticed this happened only after any app in the OS went full screen, be it a steam game, or another Firefox window, or a VLC window, or anything else that I did that made an app full screen in any of my monitors.

I am using Ubuntu 24.04 with KDE Plasma 5.27.12. Kernel is 6.14.0-29. Display server is Wayland.

Initially I thought this could be a problem with the snap version of Firefox, so now I've installed the deb package, but the problem remains. Firefox is the only app which presents a problem of any kind when any window goes full screen.

Here's a video showing what the problem looks like, in case my description was not clear. The ghostly tab in this video is the chess.com home page and you can see it as the third tab from the top right of the video, and it remains in that position as i scroll the other tabs, completely unselectable with the mouse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mAfPS3_qkg

Any idea of what could be causing this issue to appear?

Thank you!

I normally use Firefox Developer Edition, version 127 because any later version always freezes my whole computer (probably because I'm using a 15-year old PC). Recently all my extensions became disabled. I'm now also unable to install any extension because it says "Installation aborted because the add-on appears to be corrupt". I found some instructions on Mozilla website about deleting compatibility.ini and extensions folder, but it didn't solve the issue. Now I'm stuck and confused as I suspect some of the extension files that should be in my Profile folder may not be there.

The simplest solution in this case would be to use the "Refresh Firefox" option which resets everything to default settings, but every time I do it my computer freezes until rebooted. Uninstalling and reinstalling manually is also not the way to go, because it retains all the settings.

I've tried installing the standard Firefox browser (v. 119) alongside the Developer Edition but the same issue is there as well.

I'm looking for an alternative way to get a clean Firefox install, so I can fix my extensions.

Additional info: - Your system specs? Windows 10 64-bit, 4 GB RAM, Pentium Dual-core, no GPU - Hardware acceleration? Disabled. - Using any mods? Yes, two. Geckium for Firefox, which always works fine. The recent issue started when I played around with Revert8Plus, but it initially worked without issues.

I've searched other forums and I am not having any luck. If I open 1 Firefox browser then 10-15 open instances will show up under Task Manager. They load automatically. This slows down everything and I have to delete the excess browsers. Would you please offer some advice? Thank you in advance.

I opened Firefox on one of my computers as usual today but the whole performance changed. Used to go to my home tab and select various news sites to see what was happening. First, when I scroll down the bookmarks, I would hit the "news" and click on it so all the sub items would stay in the scroll, but instead of that, it wanted to open every item as a new tab. When I finally started opening the various news outlets, it opened them in new tabs, it had always opened in the same tab. Then, I couldn't close the various tabs it had opened. I would go to the tab and hit the "X" but it didn't close the tab. I had to use a drop down menu to close a tab. And when in a site, I used the scroll button on the mouse, instead of scrolling, it made the page larger or smaller instead of going up or down. What could make such a change in behavior? I opened up the 'settings' on it and looked at 'tabs' and they were the same as the ones that are on this computer that works as expected. Both computers have it set to open all previous windows and tabs. Both have the same settings for 'tabs' and 'browsing'. I don't get it. Both are version 143.0.3 (64-bit) I have Ubuntu OS.

Hello Firefox Support,

Since the latest update of the Firefox browser, I have been experiencing frequent freezes. The browser becomes unresponsive when performing basic actions such as:

• Clicking on the menu

• Closing tabs

• Copying or editing the URL

When this happens, the only way to recover is to close Firefox and reopen it.

Could you please advise on how to resolve this issue?

Thank you for your support.

Best regards, Mohamed Adel

Firefox has been running incredibly slow. I currently only have this window open, but if I open my task manger it shows 10 Firefox windows running. If I right click and end task, it will end the task, but shortly there after a new one will pop up. 1 of the is running in efficiency mode. I assume this is what is slowing down performance, but I do not know how to fix.

I get screen tearing on videos or when i scroll on any website. Only happens on Firefox, I've tested Chrome, Edge, Opera.

https://streamable.com/80gxcm

Smooth Scrolling is Off. Hardware Acceleration is Off. I've tried toggling "gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.force-enabled" Firefox is up to date.

None of this has helped.

It seems that since the Version 141.0 update, initial startup of FF seems to take ve-e-e-ery long (approx 3-4 minutes).

The startup time/lag seems almost the same as it takes to restart after an update.

Anyone else experience this also? Thanks.

When I brought Firefox up about a week ago, it presented me with a survey, results of which were sent to Firefox developers. They asked several multiple choice questions about features, but they didn't ask a very important question: Would you use Firefox more if it used less system memory? I currently use Google Chrome for about 2/3 of my web browsing because Firefox uses up too much system memory. I would prefer to use Firefox most of the time, but can't, since it bogs down when memory usage gets too high.

The survey should have included a text input box so users could enter any comments for the developers, and the survey did NOT do that.

So, after completing the survey, I was disappointed that I couldn't comment on the most important issue I have with Firefox. I would like the Firefox dev team to try get Firefox's use of system memory down. A short while ago, I opened 4 websites in Google Chrome, then opened the exact same 4 websites in Firefox. The attached shows the memory usage of each browser.