Firefox Community Forum

I've used Firefox for 20 years through the various iterations of Windows, and have been using it trouble free on Windows 11 since November 2024. Two days ago, however, When I tried to open the Guardian site (www.theguardian.com) it would open very slowly and not load and of the pictures. This gradually got worse, the site taking for ever to open at all, and always with the little dot in the tab at the top left going from side to side showing it was still loading. I have tried everything I can think of. Opened in troubleshoot mode, changed DNS settings, uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox twice (one time to see if it would work normally if I didn't actually sign in to my account). All to no avail. In fact now things are worse, in that the GOV.Uk website is now giving me similar problems - and a few other sites have become slightly slow and reluctant to open as well. My internet connection seems fine, and all these sites open without any trouble on Microsoft Edge. I am NOT very good at tech, and I am now tearing my heair out as to what I can try next.

Any help wopuld be gratefully received!

Jim Luetchford

I need help recovering my phones my settings my photos on my accounts and passwords have been changed on two devices by a person that was not supposed to be using any of my accounts including my Mozilla

Since updating Firefox from a previous version, the browser no longer displays any Unicode emoji characters. Where an emoji would normally be rendered (👁️), the browser instead displays empty space. Websites such as twitter and discord, which use their own artwork for emoji, are unaffected. This has negatively affected my browsing experience.

For illustrative purposes, I will add a series of emoji and include a screenshot of how they are displayed: (😀🙁😡💀). Other characters still display correctly: (β❖♞䷲⎈𐘢𓀺இ). My computer otherwise displays emoji correctly. The issue persists after disabling extensions, and has persisted between computer restarts.

I am using Firefox version 147.0.4 (aarch64) on a Macbook Air running macOS Sequoia 15.5.

The Firefox icon looks like it has a shopping cart on the top-left hand side. What is this for? It is only happening on the Windows 11 taskbar (not the desktop or menu shortcut).

I love Firefox and generally really appreciate the way y'all operate as a company and developer.

However, I really don't like this new function to add tabs to a group. Since it rolled out, I'm always adding tabs into groups when I don't mean to. Really, it's creating a group almost every time I move a tab around. If I delete the group, it's just more clicks and distractions to deal with.

In the past, when you've rolled out new features like this, you've also made it very easy to turn off any new feature we don't like. But I can't figure out how to turn this off. Is it possible?

Thanks for your help.

Firefox 147.0.4 on macOS 26.3 does not work via SOCKS proxy.

Firefox 147.0.4 on Windows 11 x64 works fine via the same intranet SOCKS proxy, with exactly the same settings.

The advantage of Firefox is its flexibility. It supports its own SOCKS proxy settings, independent of systems-wide ones. Unfortunately, it seems this Firefox feature is broken on macOS (but Windows version works perfectly).

Safari 26.3 (21623.2.7.11.6) and DuckDuckGo 1.177.0 (625) web-browsers that use system-wide macOS SOCKS proxy settings also works fine with this intranet proxy server. So it seems SOCKS proxy server itself is OK, and the problem is confined to Firefox on macOS.

Has anyone seen Firefox 147 on macOS work via SOCKS proxy? Is there a principal difference between how Firefox handles SOCKS proxy on macOS vs. Windows? What might be the best way to address the problem on macOS?

Thanks!

Good afternoon, After an update in recent weeks, all bookmark icons look like a globe. A few change back to the original icon after clicking on an address, but revert to the globe after restarting. Previously, I could find the address very quickly based on the icon, but now it's very difficult because I have to read and select each individual address. Kind regards, Johann Kowalski

I have been having trouble with my Windows 11 laptop. In my efforts to resolve these issues I noticed that I now have two installs of Firefox in my Control Panel. Both installed during my time of dealing with my Windows issue. Five days apart Feb 5 and 10, 2026. Both show the same version number 147.0.3, and same size 322MB. I have used FF for many years so these seem to have been installed sometime during my efforts to repair Windows. My FF was never a part of the Windows issue AFAIK.

Anyway I have FF working as I like with my Session Manager and various AddOns and personal settings, so I do not want to have to start over with FF. So how do I choose which instance of FF to uninstall in Control Panel?

My issue with Windows was my Outlook would not connect to the server. I assume Microsoft Exchange server, my internet connectivity was fine. And FF was fne as well. I eventually was able to repair my M365 connectivity. Major PITA from out of nowhere.

I am using Firefox on my MacOS Tahoe. There is a persistent annoying issue where whenever I close (physically fold) my laptop screen and reopen it, Firefox will be frozen. It will be frozen in the sense that I am unable to interact with any tabs or anything until I manually quit Firefox and reopen it (which automatically reopens all my tabs), making it usable again. This doesn't happen every time I close and reopen my Mac, but it definitely happens the majority of the time and makes the browser hard to use.

I've attached a screenshot of what a new window looks like when Firefox is frozen. It looks just like a Firefox window when unfocused.

Notes:

• It doesn't entirely freeze Firefox. In fact, I can "switch" to a different tab by clicking on the tab and then shutting and reopening my laptop again. The new tab will show on reopening but Firefox will still be frozen. This process can be repeated.
• I can pretty consistently replicate the bug by shutting my laptop, waiting 10 seconds, and reopening it. This will almost always result in the freeze.
• The bug still happens if I'm not focused on the Firefox window but on a different app.
• The bug doesn't seem to happen if I just lock my screen but don't shut it closed.

Things I've tried that haven't fixed it:

• Updating my OS.
• Restarting my laptop.
• Disabling hardware acceleration.
• Disabling themes and extensions.
• Deleting and reinstalling Firefox, including deleting the user data in the "Library/Application Support" folder.

Let me know if there's any more information I can provide or fixes I can try. Also let me know if I should go ahead and file a Firefox bug report for this. Thank you.

I just got a new Dell Windows 11 desktop PC to replace my old Dell Windows 10 PC. Since switching, there are three sites that will absolutely not load the homepage: Paypal, Venmo, and Common Dreams (which is a news site). The same sites continue to load instantly on my old Windows 10 PC in Firefox, and on the new Windows 11 PC on Edge. Firefox is the only browser I use, I just use Edge to test sites, I uninstalled Chrome because of Google's privacy and AI issues.

In the lower left corner of the window for these three sites are the following messages, for the three respective sites:

• Waiting for www.paypalobjects.com...

• Sending request to jssdks.mparticle.com...

• Waiting for www.commondreams.org...

What's going on here? Seems strange that Firefox continues to behave normally on Windows 11 for all sites except these three, and works perfectly for these three sites on my Windows 10 PC. How can I further troubleshoot and fix this? I don't want to have to use Edge to visit these three sites, esp. Paypal and Venmo.

I'm guessing it has something to do with cache or history but am not sure how to proceed...

I don't like to use the address bar to type searches. I like using the SEARCH BOX in Firefox's New Tab instead. But, with each update, I once again have to try to figure out how to set Firefox searches to be typed in the search box. Is there any way to set this so it doesn't get changed with every update?

I just had a firefox tab with a pop up asking me to try ai features... my options were "yes" or "maybe later". How do I stop the slop sales? I want ZERO pop ups... from Mozilla or anyone else! I didnt see settings that would disable mozilla sales pop ups - is there some way to turn these off permanently? I have already turned off the ai features. Really appreciate any suggestions!

I would like to remove the search options from the address bar because I preferred the old setup with a separate search window (and the address bar was just unable to perform searches). How can I set this up?

When I try to make a Google search I get the following message, "I'm not a robot" with a reCAPTCHA: "Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot. Why did this happen?". This happens on Firefox, but not Chrome or Edge. If I 'Allow' Google in the 'Exceptions - Cookies and Site Data' then I do not get the message, but it takes several seconds for Google display the resulting page. However, if I delete the cookies/cache the message will return and I have to redo the reCAPTCHA. I have scanned with Malwarebytes, Bitdefender, Hitman Pro, Trend Micro House Call and Microsoft Defender, nothing detected. Running Win 10 (64) with 'Extended Security Updates', Firefox 147.0 (64), no additional Extensions or Plugins. Also I uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox.

A heart has recently been included in the Firefox icon in my taskbar. What's the reason for it and what do I have to do so that the Firefox icon no longer has it? I've run a number of antimalware programs and they came up with nothing.