sometimes firefox opens a blank page, just a frame and nothing else
This is on a brand new laptop, I just installed firefox 25, I have not installed any add-ins yet nor have I installed any software except windows updates, and just activated the Symantec trial. (this issue happens on my old system as well which has AVG Antivirus 2013) I had 2 firefox instances open, one with 3 tabs open, one with 2 tabs open, I then started a 3rd instance of firefox which remains blank. I have not changed any default configuration yet but did install the flash plugin when requested at a website, I actually downloaded the plugin independently but did not feel like closing the browser do it installed off the prompt on the website. The tabs are boston globe epaper, aol weather, a yahoo video new item I watched, in the 2nd instance, news.msn.com and the add-ons manager. Other then this my only activity was viewing some pictures on google images and Reading some news stories on msn. This is Windows 7 pro 64 bit on a thinkpad w530. My old system was a Toshiba portege with windows 7 pro 32 bit. The above is literally all I have done on this laptop as I started using it this morning, applied the windows updates last night. I was hoping to get away from this behavior on a new laptop as I have been plagued by this issue on my old laptop but never bothered to report it as the old laptop had many years usage. The blank instance does not respond to a right-click and says mozilla firefox start page in the upper left corner border. I have not changed the default start page, In task manager, it shows as Mozilla Firefox start page. I just tried another instance and it opened correctly which is behavior similar to my old system, the blank page is intermittent and typically won't occur twice in a row. Processes tab shows 390meg memory use by firefox, 9.5 k by plugin container, 7meg and 67meg by flash plugins. Silverlight 4 and adobe acrobat 10 where already installed on this system and I see they need plugin updates, I will update these but it did not seem to matter on my old system
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A couple things additional, I meant 9.5 meg for plugin container and I closed out of all the firefox instances, firefox no longer shows on the Taskmanager application tab but the processes tab show it still has 270 meg memory tied up. It has been closed for 5 minutes The plugin container and flash processes are gone.
This thread is a moot point as my Lenovo w530 croaked with a netjoin.dll is not a valid win32 image and I was forced to reinstall windows, it had less then 8 hours use. Go figure. So far Firefox has behaved on reinstalled windows
Do you have any other issues with Firefox?
Well since you asked, On my old system which I am still using, I experience the blank frame on a regular basis but usually only when I have about 20 or more instances open with more then 850 meg of memory in use by firefox 25.0.1, also it tends to crash when I approach a gig in memory usage. I never complained about that since that system is an older dual core that was in place upgraded from vista to win7 pro so it is a special case that may not be good for evaluation. I plan to move to the Lenovo as soon as I am confident it is stable then I will rack it out with similar usage and report any meaningful information. Thanks for asking.
I assume you could disable Hardware Acceleration, but with a older processor, Firefox may already have blocklisted your card/driver.
You can check for problems with current Flash plugin versions and try these:
- disable a possible RealPlayer Browser Record Plugin extension for Firefox and update the RealPlayer if installed
- disable protected mode in the Flash plugin (Flash 11.3+ on Windows Vista and later)
- disable hardware acceleration in the Flash plugin