So, for about a month or so now I have been experiencing random freezing in Firefox on my home PC running Windows 7 (I know it's outdated, it's by choice). I'm pretty cer… (tuilleadh eolais)
So, for about a month or so now I have been experiencing random freezing in Firefox on my home PC running Windows 7 (I know it's outdated, it's by choice). I'm pretty certain it started after a specific update, but at this point can't tell which one.
Here's the behavior itself:
Firefox completely freezes and soon after the window turns white and a 'Firefox stopped responding' dialog pops up. After I close Firefox, I am able to restart it normally. However, at restart, it says 'Oops, there was a problem restoring your session' but then successfully restores the session if I click the button or select the option from the History menu (however, this does not always pop up - see the 'what I tried section').
When it happens:
1) When interacting with input forms such as login and password forms. Seemingly happens more often with forms that have previous input saved for them, but I'm not sure.
2) When opening new windows (notably NOT new tabs) such as when opening a private browsing window, bookmarks window, download history window or when using the picture-in-picture option on Youtube.
How frequently it happens:
The frequency appears to be random and not specific to any website. It most often seems to hapen after about an hour of browsing, but can also happen immediately at restart or go longer without freezing. Interestingly, disabling Ublock Origins seems to dramatically decrease the frequency of freezing, but does not eliminate it completely.
What I've tried so far:
1) Looking for problematic extensions. Running in safe mode seems to prevent the issue, so I started disabling extensions one by one. Ultimately though, even with all extensions disabled outside of safe mode, the issue persists. As noted above, it seems to freeze less often when Ublock Origins is disabled.
2) Tracking memory and CPU usage. Nothing abnormal there - I have 16 GB of memory and Firefox rarely goes over 5.
3) Refreshing Firefox. This did nothing except cause the 'Oops, there was a problem restoring your session' tab to first start appearing. Before the refresh that didn't used to happen at restart.
4) Disabling hardware acceleration. No effect.
5) Removing bookmarks. I had a very large number of bookmarks saved so I deleted a bunch of them. No effect.
6) Deleting the places database. No effect.
7) Deleting the session restore files. This has been the most interesting option. Deleting the session restore files DID stop the freezing... until it came back again in a couple of days. Interestingly, when it first came back it was not accompanied by the 'Oops, there was a problem restoring your session' message at first, but eventually that started appearing too. This gave me the thought today that perhaps this is caused by a website somehow 'corruping' the session data. I was going to delete the session restore files again and start looking for the offending website, but puzzlingly, this time deleting the files did not stop the freezing.