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Firefox keeps hanging ("not responding") every couple of minutes consistently. Nothing works to stop that

  • 29 பதிலளிப்புகள்
  • 91 இந்த பிரச்னைகள் உள்ளது
  • 4 views
  • Last reply by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer

I've gone through all the suggestions, troubleshooting listed here and nothing has worked in stopping this "hanging" business. It started earlier this week with FF16. So I tried uninstalling, clearing out any traces of it, profiles and all. R-installed with the previous extensions, plugins and scripts. Still did it. So I either disabled or uninstalled said add-ons. Still did it. Upgraded to 17, then 18. Same problem. "Not responding" every couple of minutes for just a few seconds, longer when I switched tabs. I'm a heavy tab user, but given the problem, I've gone down to no more than 3 open at the same time. Still hangs. So I decided to do a complete overhaul. Did a reset. I even thought it was my computer (Vista with SP2) which had been working fine and was slowing down around the same time FF was hanging and being a resource hog.

With FF uninstalled, with the help of Microsoft support, I worked on the laptop. Uninstalled my usual programs, including AV (which had avast). Moved all my files to an external hard drive. In essence leaving my computer with bare bones. Did a defrag and a system restore. I reinstalled av, then ran it. All clear. Ran malwarebytes. All clear. Ran registry clean. All fine. So I reinstalled FF18 and did not use any add-ons. Still hanged. Went up to FF19 beta thinking whatever but there is, would be cured. And it worked fine witn no add-ons. So I started installing my usuals, but leaving only the most important ones, ABP, No Script. Was ok so I added greasemonkey, smartest toolbar, download statusbar and unhide passwors. All which I've used for years with no problems. And FF19 worked fine with no hanging for like a day and a half. Today, (jan 24) not only is it haning and not responding again, but it's doing it more frequently and for longer.

FF never has crashed, it just hangs and freezes. My job is ALL online. I don't like Chrome (not user friendly to me). I'd rather avoid using IE. I'm a user of FF since day one, but this is stressing me out because I cannot do my job properly.

What can I do to make it stop? My only other option is to just forget FF and try and get used to Opera.

Now that I think about it, could this hanging problem be related to the Java issue that has come out publicly recently?

I don't know what else to do. I've tried everything that has been written here. Trust me, I've wasted 2 days on this issue. Time I'll never get back and I could've used to do work.

Thanks

I've gone through all the suggestions, troubleshooting listed here and nothing has worked in stopping this "hanging" business. It started earlier this week with FF16. So I tried uninstalling, clearing out any traces of it, profiles and all. R-installed with the previous extensions, plugins and scripts. Still did it. So I either disabled or uninstalled said add-ons. Still did it. Upgraded to 17, then 18. Same problem. "Not responding" every couple of minutes for just a few seconds, longer when I switched tabs. I'm a heavy tab user, but given the problem, I've gone down to no more than 3 open at the same time. Still hangs. So I decided to do a complete overhaul. Did a reset. I even thought it was my computer (Vista with SP2) which had been working fine and was slowing down around the same time FF was hanging and being a resource hog. With FF uninstalled, with the help of Microsoft support, I worked on the laptop. Uninstalled my usual programs, including AV (which had avast). Moved all my files to an external hard drive. In essence leaving my computer with bare bones. Did a defrag and a system restore. I reinstalled av, then ran it. All clear. Ran malwarebytes. All clear. Ran registry clean. All fine. So I reinstalled FF18 and did not use any add-ons. Still hanged. Went up to FF19 beta thinking whatever but there is, would be cured. And it worked fine witn no add-ons. So I started installing my usuals, but leaving only the most important ones, ABP, No Script. Was ok so I added greasemonkey, smartest toolbar, download statusbar and unhide passwors. All which I've used for years with no problems. And FF19 worked fine with no hanging for like a day and a half. Today, (jan 24) not only is it haning and not responding again, but it's doing it more frequently and for longer. FF never has crashed, it just hangs and freezes. My job is ALL online. I don't like Chrome (not user friendly to me). I'd rather avoid using IE. I'm a user of FF since day one, but this is stressing me out because I cannot do my job properly. What can I do to make it stop? My only other option is to just forget FF and try and get used to Opera. Now that I think about it, could this hanging problem be related to the Java issue that has come out publicly recently? I don't know what else to do. I've tried everything that has been written here. Trust me, I've wasted 2 days on this issue. Time I'll never get back and I could've used to do work. Thanks

All Replies (20)

File > Exit. and try it..


We're sorry to hear that your Firefox seems to be crashing. Please perform the following steps to give us a crash report ID that helps us find out more about the cause of the crash.

  1. Enter about:crashes in the Firefox location bar (that's where you enter your website names) and press Enter. You should now see a list of submitted crash reports.
  2. Copy the most recent 5 report IDs that you see in the crash report window and paste them into your forum response.

Thanks in advance for your help!

More information and further troubleshooting steps can be found in the Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly) article.

Submitted Crash Reports

No crash reports have been submitted.


This is what I got. If I did more than one "clean sweep" FF, a system restore and reinstalled FF19, there wouldn't be any reports listed, right? Besides, it doesn't crash. It just hangs and doesn't respond. And nothing on that article works. I've tried it all. All my plugins, drivers, windows updates, AV and spyware programs are up to date and have detected nothing.

I'm not going to try the Memtest86 that's recommended. The last update was 25/01/2011 and I've no clue which one to download anyway.  :(

Thanks.

Memory problems would cause a hangs, but more likely an immediate crash.


Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from an existing profile to the new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.


Try to boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.

Nothing worked. As a matter of fact, dealing with the profile change only made it hang longer and I must've really done something wrong because now my whole computer is funky and won't do a proper system restore. I'll just quit this, use the FF with the hanging. (NO I will not use Chrome, not user friendly to my needs). And have someone help me with the computer issue because unless I win the lottery, a new computer is out of the question.

BTW, the profile back up as suggested in the links, totally NOT working. I can't even find a way to USE that back up so I've lost ALL my bookmarks (again)

thanks for the suggestions. Bye

moritafan40 மூலமாக திருத்தப்பட்டது

If you are able to locate the Firefox Profile Folder then all you need to do is to copy all files to another folder or a removable USB storage device.

  • C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\

The "Application Data" folder in XP/Win2K and the "AppData" folder in Windows Vista and later Windows 7+ versions are hidden folders.

It isn't a memory issue, it's a issue with firefox being open for a certain amount of time, a coding issue with firefox itself, say its 1 hours, after 1 hour if mozilla firefox is using more than 300mb of memory(regardless of how much memory u have 8/16/32gb) firefox will hang for about 5-10 seconds, stating as 'not responding' and then unfreeze, this has happened for well over a year now, doesn't happen with other browsers.

So yes it happens to everyone cor-el try it for yourself, load 20 tabs with info, leave your computer on 24/7 come back the next day, this issue will arise, only way to fix is to exit and reload and reload previous session. I may give up mozilla firefox as this is very irritating.

Windows 7 64 bit, with or without adblock plus(any version), default settings.

The posts are interesting because I've been a Firefox (FF) user for awhile. Now, for no apparent reason, FF hangs all the time. I am NOT a heavy Internet user and, as such, do not have a lot of tabs open at any given time. Most of what I do online is check email or download software updates (engineering-related software such as MATLAB and media production software such as Nuendo). Have pretty much same software on all computers. Tried removing traces of FF for clean install. This included regedit to remove anything in registry that might cause problem. FF continues to hang (including fresh install of FF 19), and is more noticeable on my quad core computer w/ 8 GB RAM (clearly have the processing power). All other software working fine. Would be interested in finding solution, but may give Opera a try just so I can get to emails, etc. Pretty strange, as never had problems until now. Thanks for any help. ELC

I have 4 computers in my home office and I also have a laptop. Firefox hangs on all 4 of these computers under windows, and on my laptop, and even under linux. Flash simply doesn't work on Firefox. This has been true on all operating systems from windows XP to windows 7. I haven't tried windows 8, but I'd be surprised if it works there. It performs poorly on ubuntu 12.04 as well.

I usually see the hanging behavior within about 10 minutes of starting firefox. Visiting utube or other flash heavy sites exacerbates the problem.

I am always astonished when mozilla claims that it's only a small minority of users who see the hanging behavior. I have never seen firefox be stable since they went to the rapid update cycle. For this reason I now exclusively use chrome, even though chrome's UI is pathetic, and I hate chrome actually.

Unfortunately Firefox is unusable. If Firefox were so bug free, then why has it's market share plummeted over the last couple of years? Frankly they need to fix the bugs for all platforms prior to another useless update. Fast light and robust would bring back the fanbase.

Here is a little you tube video that causes an instant hang for me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wiG2Fa2dlQ

SevenThunders மூலமாக திருத்தப்பட்டது

Do all those computers use the same router to connect to internet?

If that is the case then maybe you should find the problem there.

They do, but the laptop has been used over many different routers and exhibits the same phenomenon. Flash has been the death of firefox for me.

At one time or other I tried most of the proposed fixes, e.g. updating flash (always use the latest) or creating a new profile. I have all my plugins disabled except flash.

My understanding is that chrome sandboxes flash in a way by launching it in a separate process so that when it inevitably crashes, the browser still lives. It's unfortunate that adobe is working directly with Google now to create their own version of flash.

If their approach to flash is open source, perhaps it could be "borrowed" to fix t his problem, until html 5 becomes real. I'm just sad that firefox is dead.

Oddly opera behaves a little better as well, but is otherwise unusable due to the way they handle javascript and their inane security policies.

I've been having a very similar issue for the last several months now. I have an old XP machine with a fairly good processor. It is old, and I need to replace it sometime soon, but it's still good for a lot of things. I do some heavy photo editing, and sometimes work on image files that are several gigs in size (with photoshop having a duplicate of that file open as a temp file while I work on it).

I work with task manager open to monitor CPU usage, and what started happening several months ago with FF is it would start hanging. At the same time, CPU would be maxed out, then drop significantly after a few seconds, then max out again. That didn't happen too often, but I was also getting strange java errors. Something about a script being unresponsive and evil sandboxes. (If I could remember more, I would outline it specifically).

I was using FF 16 and an outdated java, so I updated everything in Feb. to the most recent versions. Nothing was fixed.

Being more scrupulous now, I realize that FF works relatively fine unless I have Google or Gmail open in a tab. After a few minutes, it will start to hang, and the CPU will max out, ramp down for a second, and ramp up again. Essentially, that means that every 5-10 seconds, I have ONE second to interface with the browser until it hangs again. Essentially, I CANNOT use google or gmail.

There has to be a way to fix this. I've been a long time user of FF. I also use it at work on an old Mac PPC, OS 10.5.8, FF v. 3.6.28. There are NO issues with it, only on my XP machine.

Any suggestions?

I have the same problem and have been a Firefox user for a long time. I hope they can figure this out. I switched over to IE for a short time and it works fine but my family prefers Firefox as do I so I hope it's figured out REAL soon. These hangups are a pain. I have my google page shut down right now and it's still hanging up as I type! So not sure that's the answer either.

The only saving grace for it at the moment is that the browser restore works fine, which was one of the features that initially turned me on to FF years and years ago.

When I'm working on something important with a lot of tabs open and FF starts hanging too much, I just terminate the FF process in task manager. Afterwards, I open up FF again and restore the browser. Fortunately, not every tab reloads. You have to click on each one to reload it, so if you had 20 tabs open before, it won't immediately tax your system and you can load them as necessary.

If I let my system idle with the browser open, the periods where the CPU is maxed out and FF hanging gets longer and longer. Overnight, a 5-10 second hang can turn into, say, a 1 minute hang or more. At that point I really have no choice but to terminate. I noticed that FF 21 just came out, maybe that'll do something...

I am feel exactly thee same problem. This FF stinks. The only good thisng is the TAB wich we can scroll between them with the mouse scroll... If I could do the same on the other browsers, for sure would no longer be using FF. The worst thing is that when I open many tab simply shuts down and appears after a pop-up asking you to resend the error report, and reboot ... Only crap!

I'm having the same issues. Things started getting really bad the last week or so. I am SO sick and tired of trying to navigate between tabs and getting the "not responding" delay and hearing the hard drive start up it's whirling.

I've always had about 10 or more tabs open at a time. I've always had issues with Firefox taking up tons of memory after being open about an hour. Yes, I know I shouldn't have that many tabs open. But I'm not the only one who does this.

Firefox has always had these issues. It just seems much worse now, so much so that I went searching for some kind of fix and found this thread. I was not optimistic about finding a real solution. I'm tired of going thru lists of things to adjust, only to find my settings are already this way and/or the suggestions do nothing.

I switched over the Chrome the other day when I couldn't take Firefox anymore and surprise, surprise...it worked just fine. I don't like Chrome as well as Firefox but some of that is just because I haven't used it for as long and not used to it. I may have to become used to it. Just getting so sick of the Firefox issues.

Amazing is s how the FF do nothing, and do not want to know. Right now I'm using Maxthon which is a solution. The only drawback is the fact that I can not use the mouse wheel, so I can navigate between the TABs. Anyway, better to start moving...

For me, when I have tabs or even a single tab open to a page that causes the ever-increasing hanging, you would think that it ought to disappear once those tabs are closed. The second I notice a little bit of hanging, I'll close the tab(s) that are causing it and keep just a blank tab open, hoping it will subside and allow me to relaunch the page I was working on without restarting the whole browser. But no, it often stays stuck even with just the blank tab open.

It's happening now. I had just launched the browser and was reading a news article. I launched gmail in another tab and went back to reading. A few seconds later, it started hanging. With gmail, the offending page, closed, it's still hanging. It's REALLY hard to deal with typing while the browser hangs.

Yes, it is hard to try to type...or do anything...in a browser that is constantly hanging.

It's incredibly frustrating. Yesterday, I disabled a few add ons. I don't have a bunch, but I do use firebug and in doing some searches had seen people reporting that they noticed it was slowing down Firefox. I haven't had a chance to look into this further, to see if maybe latest versions of Firebug are a problem. But for now, it seems to have helped my situation.

But then again, I have just had the browser open for about 10 minutes. Check back with me again in an hour  ;)

I had firebug for a short while, but it was one of the first things I disabled when I noticed problems. I also had NoScript running to try and help, but it didn't seem to. Reloading pages that I didn't want blocked was a pain, and figuring out which scripts I wanted was too time consuming.

I did install Chrome just to see, and it didn't have any lag on a long, multi-tab google search. Still... I HATE the trend in user interfaces like the one on Chrome. Maybe there's a way to change it, but I didn't see one. I really hate not have a conventional, old school menu bar. Chrome has every menu function clumped into one little button. Just about the only extra option I could place in the toolbar was the home button.

Then again, you're talking to someone who's still fond of using XP in Classic mode...

Well so far for me today, it seems that disabling Firebug has alleviated my Firefox not responding issues. I'm crossing my fingers.

I disabled Firebug yesterday and was running without it just fine for about an hour. Then, I needed Firebug, so I enabled it. Within about a minute of Firebug being active, sure enough, I started getting not responding errors, then a script error that was tied to Firebug.

I, too, have never had any lag problems when using Chrome for extended periods and with lots of tabs open.

I'm not too fond of the sparse interface of Chrome either. For some reason, I just feel lonely when using it, like I'm not quite "connected." I can't explain it well...

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