Beginning 3 days ago, for no reason I know of, Firefox has become sluggish and active windows frequently report that they are "not responding": the cursor will spin, char… (meer info)
Beginning 3 days ago, for no reason I know of, Firefox has become sluggish and active windows frequently report that they are "not responding": the cursor will spin, character entry is impossible, scrolling can't be invoked, and even clicks on other open tabs are ignored. (As an example, it has required more than 5 minutes to enter this text so far, even though I am now running in Safe Mode.)
Memory and system utilization usage is unchanged from earlier views under Task Manager (FF with many windows/tabs open may take on average 1524MB out of 32GB on the machine, and perhaps 5% of the cores, more or less).
I have opened no new or never-used-before tabs in this period, and have also closed a handful of them to see whether that produced any difference in these symptoms. (It did not.)
As mentioned I am operating in Safe Mode and these errors persist. In any case my only add-on is Adblock Plus. I upgraded FF to v87.0 last night on the chance that the version change would make a difference, with negative results.
At the moment Troubleshooting info indicates that I have "9/9" Multiprocess Windows, and I will try to include an image from that page.
These hangs occur in all windows, so the fundamental problem appears to be in a more basic process.
No other function on the pc is misbehaving in any way, but FF itself is now nearly unusable.
The only temporary cure I have found is to restart FF, after which there are no occurrences of non-responsive windows for a period of only 3 minutes to 15 minutes (during which FF memory and cpu utilization are generally constant).
Reinstalling FireFox or engaging in further profile updates or about:config changes are all well in scope for this problem determination. The one restriction here is that I cannot afford to lose my current windows/tab entries.
Many thanks in advance for all assistance, questions, and suggestions!