Do you have McAfee Site Advisor installed, that extension has been causing problems particularly with Google. If you have it try disabling it to see if Firefox works. You can also try installing the latest version (3.3.1) of the Site Advisor, that one should work.

Mozilla are planning on blocking older versions of McAfee Site Advisor in Firefox 4 due to the problems they cause.

My problem when I open the Google page is a little more serious. The whole program stops to respond and the only thing I can do is to click on the Close program button. After that, I still have to open the Windows Task Manager (in Windows 7) to close the program there as well, since it's still running in the background.

Actually I do have McAfee Site Advisor and I went to http://www.siteadvisor.com/ and updated it. Now it works great with no problems, thanks TonyE.

Thanks too, TonyE, and Zezmex as well. I had indeed the McAfee Site Advisor installed and I disabled the version I had. I downloaded the newest one but still have to reboot my computer. The problem with Google however went away before I rebooted anyway. I also noticed that I couldn't open PDF files in Firefox 4, before I disabled the previous version of McAfee Site Advisor. Now I open these PDF files without a problem. Is that a coincidence or not?

Hi, This latest Firefox 4 has been a real problem. We have had everything from every search resulting in no response, no interaction with Flash player and now everything freezes when we try Google. As a small web based business, we cannot stand the hassle and time - so now we standardise on 'Safari'. Grateful to know when any updates for this Mozilla is available though.

I am having the same problem, every time I try to do a search, it freezes. I use Bullguard for virus protection. What a pain.

I went back to 3.6.16 - no freezes!

I'm running V3.6.16 in XP, and Going Mad Fast. Malware can't detect anything, but FireFox can't connect with google.com And apart from a few regularly cached pages, nothing loads, everything seems to be just "loading". I don't have McAfee Site Adviser installed, so it's not that. The problem has started in the past 3 days. It's not broadband speed - BBC iPlayer is working perfectly well at around 2Mb download. The problem is driving me insane!

The 3.6.16 upgrade was automatically installed last night when I restarted Firefox. Since then I haven't been able to access any sites from google.com. (Sites on other servers, such as translate.google.com and maps.google.com work fine.)

I've cleared cache & cookies, checked settings, restarted firefox, rebooted the computer - nothing works. Other websites work fine - unless they have a google widget of some kind, then that part of the page loads as an error message.

This is driving me up the freaking wall.