Firefox for Android Community Forum

Recently, my Samsung A23 5G started freezing when closing tabs. I only started having this issue since Firefox updated to a new version with a new UI. I am currently on 147.0.3 on both devices. I load one tab, close it, load another, and then it usually freezes on the next close. Clearing the cache often allows me to go a couple more tabs without freezing, while simply closing Firefox still usually has the limit of two tabs before freezing. I usually just press "close app" when the "Firefox isn't responding" system box comes up. I've restarted my Samsung phone but the issue persists. My new Moto G Stylus 2025 doesn't freeze, but Firefox still feels noticably slower, especially when closing tabs.

I've uploaded three screenshots. The first one shows how it freezes while I close a tab, while the second shows how Android's "not responding" message comes up. The third one shows the current version on both of my phones.

Top bar reappears after page scrolled down, preventing further scrolling, but when releasing finger at the top of the screen the bar completely disappears and doesn't come back.

149.0a1 (Build #2016141823), 62b991cbf35038109ba97ee21e4de10476194d9a GV: 149.0a1-20260203210813 AS: 149.20260203050225 OS: Android 16

Ever since the Fennec F-Droid 142 update, Fennec has trouble loading pages properly, even when you currently have Internet access. This happens when you try to access any page directly from the home page and from the status bar from within the app, and the page tries to connect but completely stalls with loading as a result. This issue is not affected by the in-app mini browser view that pops up when tapping a link in another app to preview in Fennec or when you have any other app open that uses the Android System WebView (or in most cases, any WebKit based browser, as it doesn't have to be the Android System WebView most the time for this bug to go away!) for loading content, which in fact this strange bug in Fennec will go away as a result.

This issue is only addressed in Fennec F-Droid 142 and does not affect any other forks of Firefox or even the proper upstream versions of Firefox where this issue does not occur. This issue only occurs every time after restarting your Android device, in fact the one that I'm using is a Google Pixel 8 Pro.

I have also reported this issue directly to Google engineers so that they know what might be going on. Given that I'm on a beta version of Android 16 (QPR2 beta 1), this is to be expected. Thank you all so much as hopefully someone at Mozilla will have a small patch ready for when Fennec 143 goes into testing pretty soon!

Edit: here's the relevant Issue page in Fennec's GitLab repository. Use this project if you want to cut out some of Mozilla's unwanted additions. https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/issues/134

I can't reproduce it, but sometimes the URL bar becomes unresponsive. You click on it and nothing appens. I've tried to delete cache and history, but nothing changes.