Firefox sometimes freezes when loading new pages
I have had an issue for several months now & any help with it would be gratefully appreciated. Quite often, when loading a new page, Firefox will hang for up to 30 seconds; the loading circle in the left hand corner of the tab will freeze & I will be locked out of the browser. That website's usually then fine for the rest of the session, but if I close and reopen Firefox the same thing will happen again.
I have tried other browsers such a IE, and the same thing also happens there. My laptop is becoming quite claggy in general, but I'm hoping I can at least find a solution to this!
Vsi odgovori (3)
Do you get a dialog saying a script is running slowly with Stop/Continue buttons, or does the problem just clear up without any messages?
Two other thoughts:
(1) To diagnose a possible Flash issue, you can switch the Shockwave Flash plugin to "Ask to Activate." The page should load the non-Flash components first. If it's just as slow, then we can rule out Flash as a potential culprit, but if it's much faster, that would be useful to know.
You can make the change on the Add-ons page. Either:
- Ctrl+shift+a
- orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons
In the left column, click Plugins. Then use the drop-down list for Shockwave Flash to select "Ask to Activate."
Sites that use Flash will generate a notification icon on the address bar, and either a link will appear in the black rectangle where you normally get videos loading automatically, or an infobar will slide down between the toolbar area and the page.
(2) About 8 months ago, a user with an enormous font collection discovered that when visiting pages that use downloadable fonts for the first time during a session, Firefox would hang for 3 minutes. (Firefox hangs on Websites (example: g2play.net)) I don't know whether this is still a problem, but if you have tons of fonts, as a diagnostic, you could temporarily disable downloadable fonts.
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box that appears above the list, type or paste gfx and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled preference to switch its value from true to false.
I say temporary because many sites now use fancy fonts to display little icons instead of using images. With downloadable fonts disabled, these icons turn into tall rectangles with two rows of two characters (in other words, useless).
Hi, thanks so much for your help. It looks like your suggestion of it being a Shockwave issue is correct. I have changed Shockwave to 'Ask to Activate' and this seems to have sorted the problem.
Do I just need to leave Firefox set up like this now, or is there any way to have Shockwave running on my laptop and not have it cause these problems?
Thanks again.
We're getting closer. Since Flash works when it's running, I think the problem might be the protected mode feature. To disable that, see this support article from Adobe under the heading "Last Resort": Adobe Forums: How do I troubleshoot Flash Player's protected mode for Firefox?
Windows may require using an editor with elevated privileges to edit the mms.cfg file. You can right-click Notepad on the Start menu and Run as Administrator to do that.