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V 12 Firfox creates 1,000nds of .TMF in temp folder never deletes them

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  • 8 have this problem
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  • Last reply by Gamenut

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Using V12 Firefox with MS windows 2000 Pro Unknown to me is Firefox makes as many as 2 .TMF ( not .tmP) per minute and only a check of hard drive found over 15,000 .TMFs in a temp directory sucking up over 900 MEG bytes of hard drive !

Shutdown of laptop, reboot, etc or using MS to clean unused files, nothing deletes these .TMP other then me now going to temp directory and deleting them

With my business I am on internet like 14 hours day, 7 days a week so Firefox is used most of the time

I have found no setting in Firefox including cache settings but know no other program is doing this and monitoring temp directory while using Firefox I can see these .TMF files being made/saved about 22 to 70 K bytes in length.

Also why is Firefox not supporting MS windows 200 pro for newer version to V 12 I have now to be installed ?

Using V12 Firefox with MS windows 2000 Pro Unknown to me is Firefox makes as many as 2 .TMF ( not .tmP) per minute and only a check of hard drive found over 15,000 .TMFs in a temp directory sucking up over 900 MEG bytes of hard drive ! Shutdown of laptop, reboot, etc or using MS to clean unused files, nothing deletes these .TMP other then me now going to temp directory and deleting them With my business I am on internet like 14 hours day, 7 days a week so Firefox is used most of the time I have found no setting in Firefox including cache settings but know no other program is doing this and monitoring temp directory while using Firefox I can see these .TMF files being made/saved about 22 to 70 K bytes in length. Also why is Firefox not supporting MS windows 200 pro for newer version to V 12 I have now to be installed ?

All Replies (14)

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What kind of files are created in the temp folder?

Boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.

Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from an existing profile to the new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.

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Firefox making all these .TMF files with names like tp7d000.tmf

I made a new profile and that did NOT solve the problem as .TMFs already made in document and users, local temp directory as older profile did Attached is print screens, notice how often by timestamps while firefox is running and here is a hex editor shot of a tmf contents, like font types ?

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Did you try to boot the computer in Safe Mode?

Boot the computer in Windows Safe Mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.

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You have a very old operating system, which Firefox no longer supports. It is highly suggested that you upgrade to Windows 7 or 8.

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Firefox doesn't support Windows 2000 any longer. Microsoft ended support for Windows 2000 almost 3 years ago, in July 2010.

Are you using Word Perfect on that laptop?
That appears most often in a file extension search for the TMF file extension. Tagged Font Metric File

What indication do you have that Firefox is creating those files? Firefox doesn't typically use that folderset to store files.

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For one I have no intent in taking a older laptop which may not even support drivers for Win 7 or 8 just because Firefox decides what is too old

I have many programs used in my work that came out years ago and are not supported on Win 7 or 8 plus those OS require much more memory and do nothing more then Win 2000 Pro does

I know for a fact Firefox is making these .tmf files because I deleted them all. Did not run Firefox for some time and no .tmf were created. Loaded Firefox and within few minutes several .tmf files show up and all timestamps are when Firefox is running

There is no Word Perfect on this laptop, only use MSword.

According to firefox forum where I posted someone replied with a search link and in fact Firefox first saw this flaw in 2004 and even then decided not to fix the problem when Win 2000 was still reported yet plays it as if no one heard of it before :-( Imagine I had over 15,000 .tmf files being created 2-3 times every few minutes

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I have a similar set up running Windows 2K on a fairly elderly HP desktop and I now have 6226 tmf files in my temp folder, all created in the past 18 months. They are created when I access certain websites. I know one is the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/). By opening one of the files in TextPad I can see that the content has to do with font files. There is text visible in the hex display of the file that includes the words "Pratt-Heavy" and "this font was generated by the Font Squirrel Generator". I suspect that we might be able to somehow tell Firefox not to use that generator but I don't know how. There are no matches in my config file for pratt or squirrel.

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Thanks for the reply and seeing the same thing I am At least you did not have 15,000 of those TMF files :-( You'd think at the least the Fiefox would delete them when getting out of the program and no cleaner I used found those files on their own and deleted them

Clearly you see same thing in looking at the content of those files as something to do with fonts but use no program with the vendor you mention nor see anything in Firefox related to fonts used from outside it's program and see no way to config Firefox to delete those files so stuck using a scheduler and program to manually once a day to delete those files. Being these files are small 20-100K bytes and as many that are made is also then writing all over hard drive and also then have to get rid of the scatter of drive space they cause.

Yea I also see this does not happen on all websites I visit but do not know why the others cause this trigger to make those TMF files

Modified by jrvette1

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Firefox itself doesn't use the Temp folders, but there are some plugins which do use that folderset.

Based on that SeaMonkey Bug report, have you been able to discover which website is downloading those files? If you can pin point it to one or two websites, you might possibly be able write a userContent,css to have Firefox ignore the .tmf files.


There is a support thread over at MozillaZine about installing Firefox 13+ versions on Windows 2000.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=2482475

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Maybe this helps ?

I manually deleted the .TMFs out of the temp directory Left that directory window up and then on random went to several websites starting with my own website, forum and frontstore. Temp directory stated empty

Went to other websites, monitored directory and still empty Went to http://www.nascar.com/en_us/sprint-cup-series.html Nascar website, as soon as I did TMF started to appear

14 of them in just a few minutes ( about 4 made per minute) even with idle on their man webpage files are from 20 to 100K and filenames such as they all start with TP and like TP89000.tmf looking with hex editor of a tmf file starts like as i shown in screen snapshots above posting

Here is another website that going to with Firefox produces TMF http://www.autoblog.com/

And a 3rd site http://jalopnik.com/

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When I fetch THIS page that you are reading I get four new tmf files.

I have checked the style files on two or three webpages using the Style Editor in Firefox under Tools->Web Developer and it is clear to me that the tmf files are directly related to the '@font-face' CSS commands in the style files. Check your Nascar page for an example.

But I can't get any further than this. Perhaps the files were being created as a debugging aid when the '@font-face' code was written - and got accidentally left in the production code?

I have been reading the webpage on using newer versions of Firefox with Windows 2K, mentioned by the ed-meister. It sounds promising, though a bit scary. There is of course Opera too - it seems happy to support Windows 2K still, and as far as I know it doesn't belong to any of the web dictators. I only tried it recently and found it quite attractive but I have a large XUL application that I cannot abandon.

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Opera's compatibility with Windows 2000 may not last very wrong. Opera 15 is going to based upon Blink, as a fork of WebKit, being developed by Opera and the Google Chromium project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28layout_engine%29

http://www.chromium.org/blink

I think the limitations with Windows 2000 support isn't necessarily with the browsers themselves, but rather the Windows installers and the version of the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable package used when building the browser. The switch from Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 (or 2005) Redistributable to Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86 Redistributable for "building" Firefox is what killed Windows 2000 SP4 and WinXP SP1 compatibility with Firefox 13+ versions. The unofficial Windows 2000 SP 5 service pack mentioned in that MozillaZine Builds thread that I hyperlinked provides the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 x86 Redistributable compatibility to allow the Firefox installer to function.

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Not sure if someone answered this to your satisfaction. I recently updated Firefox to V12 from 3.6.28 as I am also running Win2K with no plans to upgrade, the hardware will not support XP or later. As soon as I completed the update to Firefox V12, what do you think I found? A mass of .tmf files in a temp directory. With the comments above about "fonts", I opened the Firefox options page; select the "Content" icon; in the middle section "Fonts & Colors" select the "Advanced" radio button; UNCHECK the box next to "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above". Now you will no longer have the .tmf files, you will also have more basic web pages that only show the fonts selected from the options page. Its a trade-off, in my case, I don't care about the "Author's" fonts, they don't show up very well on my cheesy monitor anyway. At least the .tmf files are no longer generated.