Hi fisherman8387,
I can understand your frustration. I can see this must affect quite a lot of individual FB users. I even asked earlier if anyone had tried to research this with FB contacts. Get some Idea of proportions involved. Someone on FB probably already knows the cause & solution !

However we also know it does not affect everyone. In fact % wise it probably only affects a very small proportion of FB users.

I am having the same issue started today. Does anyone know if the firefox team is working on this issue? I would be nice if they said something about this!

Everyone trying to help can be considered part of the Firefox team, especially guigs2 who is part of the HelpDesk paid staff. Firefox is a collaborative effort.

Should any of this turn out to be down to a fault in Firefox a bug report is filed and developers then look at that to see what needs doing. The first step is trying to identify describe and reproduce the problem. We seem to be struggling on that. Bugs have been filed but apparently not ones that have enough information in them to be useful to easily work on.

Possibly it will turn out to be a set of problems we are looking at rather than a single one, and it could be for instance problems on the Facebook side with particular accounts, or problems where particular third party software is installed.

Trying in Firefox safemode and clean Firefox profiles rules out the cause as being some of the many possible Firefox customisations and extensions.
It does not rule out third party Firefox plugins, or other third party software on the computer.

Cookies, Prefs, & New Profiles.

Something to consider in hard to reproduce cases like this is who has tried what ?

There could be a tendency for some of us to look at the fact that anoher had tried a new profile, clearing cookies, safemode, or whatever but not then try that ourselves because someone has already tried it and it didnot help them.

It is even worse when it comes to third party software. Mote than one application may cause the issue, and that may be dependent on software settings or further interaction with something else.

If you are someone that can reproduce the issue in Fx28 AND run FB ok in Fx27
How many of you are able to show the problem exists in Firefox 28 but not Firefox 27. In addition to the the troubleshooting steps already suggested maybe it is also worth now trying

• In a new Facebook account. Not only in your existing account.
• Have you tried in Windows own Safe Mode'
  http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/start-computer-safe-mode#start-computer-safe-mode=windows-vista
• Is anyone seeing the issue on Mac or Linux ?
  (And has tried all the troubleshooting steps)

I have just created a new Facebook profile and tried it there and it didn't happen. Still happens in my own Facebook profile though (even after starting in safe mode with all plug-ins disabled).

I am just carrying out the regression. It is a lengthy process (including the fact that mozregression itself has an issue with 64bit systems), so I do not know the final breakpoint yet but it seems there are two between three stages:

1. Firefox works. 2. Firefox crashes. 3. Firefox is not responding.

All those steps are bound to Firefox 28 nightly. It seems there had been a problem with crashes, which was identified, but the solution was only partial and led to the instability (not-responding behaviour of the official release).

The breakpoint between stages 1 and 2 follows:

http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/pushloghtml?fromchange=50dcaa9d8d1a&tochange=dd984f4c205f

The breakpoint between stages 2 and 3 follows:

http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/pushloghtml?fromchange=bed37a1c69a5&tochange=87468d6fc936

Ever since my 3 different Windows PCs upgraded to Firefox 28, I've been having constant and unexplained "not responding" errors in Firefox where the whole browser screen locks up, and the only way out is to quit the program.

I tried doing the Firefox reset function and that changed nothing. I also made sure all my plugins and extensions were up to date, and trimmed out some older ones. No help.

So finally, one thing that seems to have helped is simply going back to the Firefox download archives and reinstalling the full Firefox 27 download on top of Firefox 28, and then setting the program NOT to auto update. For now, this seems to have halted the problems.

Something is clearly amiss in Firefox 28, because I wasn't having any of these programs before. And as soon as my machines upgraded to version 28, I started to have the problems on all of them anytime I was using Firefox.

BTW, just to be clear, I wasn't even trying any Facebook activity to get these freezing problems. It would be any random webpage and then trying to do any activity on that page would cause the freezing.

Just to add - the issue does not seem to be anyhow specifically connected to some hardware or an internet connection. I ran Firefox 28 on Ubuntu Linux with the same laptop computer and the same internet connection without any problems. Nevertheless, there might be some OS specific (Windows) or driver specific behaviour, which has not been excluded by this investigation.

The regression showed problems introduced during the alpha stage of development connected with NS prefetching improvement, which took shape by Firefox crashes (bug 945308, solved). The remaining question is whether

• the "not-responding" behaviour was introduced by the patch, or
• emerged sometimes between "crashing" bug and its solution (and was covered by crashing), or
• is an unresolved relic of the "crashing" bug...

jfchandler,

No, don't do that! FF 28 fixes egregious, well-known security flaws. You should either use the Notepad/Gmail Compose window/etc. workaround in FF 28 or use a different browser. FF 27 is what it is -- history.

xmrazik,

Great you have got STR and regression ranges. I suggest you post the information in Bug 977668

Either someone will confirm the bug and hopefully next someone will be allocated to it and start work on it, or they will decide this is a slightly different issue as there is a hang but no crash in which case they will probably suggest filing a new bug.

I am having the exact same problem. I'm running Windows 8. Cleared cache, started FF in Safe Mode, Reset Firefox, nothing helped. It's infuriating and I don't understand why Mozilla doesn't seem to care about this bug. It's obviously an issue with FF 28, I didn't have this issue with previous versions, and it ONLY happens with Facebook and the dynamic search when typing status updates or comments. When it hangs, grays out and goes to "Not Responding" I've checked Task Manager and found Firefox is using 90%-100% of my CPU when it hangs! Unacceptable. Fix please!

Hi Sue7M3,

Sorry you feel frustrated. It is not proving too easy to reproduce the problem. That makes it difficult to investigate and can not be given to someone to fix if the person can not see any problem.

Anyone else using Webroot antimalware products? Figured I'd just throw that out there, since hard-to-duplicate bugs are often tied to antimalware conflicts...

Security software does obviously not anything to do with the issue. I use only Avast but I was easily able to reproduce the problem even if I switched the shields off.

It is also obviously not specifically connected with drivers as I switched from wireless to wired connection and reproduced the "frozen" state again.

So it seems to be a Windows specific faulty name server prefetching issue.

No, I use Windows Defender.

xmrazik,

"Security software does obviously not anything to do with the issue."

Never make a statement like that unless the idea has been considered and then logically ruled out.

Switching shields off is not necessarily the same as not running your security software. The hooks are often down low -- I have tracked down many antimalware conflicts over the years where "off" and "uninstalled" were different. [Comodo was famous for that.]

But, since we have Webroot, Avast and Windows Defender, looks like it's time to rule out a specific antimalware vendor!

I had been using McAfee ... but yesterday I switched to Zone Alarm and I don't seem to be having the problem now??

EDIT: No sooner did I write this than it happened again :(

But at least it seems to happen less often now.

This ridiculous crash just happened 4 times in less than 15 minutes. Since you refuse to fix it and would rather blame us users and spew out canned replies telling us to reset Firefox or restart in Safe Mode (which you have been told repeatedly do not help!), I am deleting the piece of garbage Firefox has become and moving back to Chrome. Hate to do it but you refuse to fix this infuriating bug and it's made Facebook totally unusable to me.

One should log in to and out of Facebook at least three times. Not always the issue takes effect at first attempt.

Nevertheless, I booted into Windows safe mode with networking and within that mode I was not able to reproduce the problem. So it is perhaps somehow concerned with the OS but it is not clear how.

Well, FWIW, as soon as I reverted one of my Windows 7 machines to Firefox 27 instead of Firefox 28, the freezing (Firefox not responding) problems ceased entirely on that machine.

FF 27 was fine up until a week or two ago, so I don't think it's going to kill me or my computers to go with that version until the folks at Mozilla work out whatever bug(s) have arisen in FF28.

As I said above, my freezing problems weren't happening in Facebook, which I rarely use, but instead across web pages in general. I had zero freezing problems before under FF 27.

But as soon as my three Windows PCs updated to FF 28, I began to have the same exact freezing (FF not responding) problems across all three different machines.

Pretty much as soon as I opened any web page and tried to do anything to navigate on the page or click any command, the freeze up would occur.