For a while now, I've been having recurring issues with Firefox desktop freezing and becoming totally unresponsive. If there's any pattern to what causes it, I haven't be… (read more)
For a while now, I've been having recurring issues with Firefox desktop freezing and becoming totally unresponsive. If there's any pattern to what causes it, I haven't been able to notice it; sometimes it happens as soon as I open the browser, sometimes it happens after several hours, sometimes it happens twice in ten minutes, sometimes it happens twice in a few hours (however, I can count the number of days it's happened less than twice in one day in the past few weeks on the fingers of one hand). When the browser freezes, it becomes totally unresponsive - it doesn't fade or display "Not Responding", and Task Manager shows nothing abnormal, but it doesn't accept any input at all, any video or other animated material that may have been displaying freezes, and it can only be "fixed" by force quitting from the task manager and reopening. This is exclusively a firefox issue; other programs open at the same time as the browser freezes are not affected.
The only real lead I have as to what could be going on is that sometimes, things don't freeze all at once, but in a cascading effect. For example, tabs, bookmarks, etc. might not highlight when moused over, but still accept the clicks, or selecting another tab might causes the address bar to display the URL of the selected tab, but the screen displayed in the window will not change. Once these cascading changes start, they generally progress to total freeze before I have a chance to do much with that information (only a few seconds), but it's unusual enough behavior to be worth noticing.
Things I've already tried that haven't fixed the issue:
- Reducing the number of tabs used and otherwise reducing Firefox's system resource usage has not impacted the problem in any way.
- Running in Troubleshoot Mode has not had a consistent effect on the problem (the most recent time I did, the browser ran stably for longer than I could stand to use the internet without my ad blocker, but this is only one data point in an already inconsistent spread; prior instances of the problem have occurred in Troubleshoot Mode)
- Disabling hardware acceleration has not fixed the issue.
- The issue has persisted through multiple refreshes and at least one full uninstall and clean reinstall.
- The issue persisted after creating and switching to a new profile multiple times.
- The issue persisted after renaming places.sqlite
- The issue persisted after clearing cache and cookies multiple times.
- The issue persisted after clearing downloads and history.
- And very likely some other stuff that I'm forgetting, I've been trying to fix this on my own for a while now.
