this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023

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Firefox is badly broken for me, and I've never been able to figure out why (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I switched back to firefox last week because I wanted to get away from Chromium. I was previously using Brave.

I have been having a MULTITUDE of issues with FF this week, and if I can't figure out how to resolve them I'm going back to Brave. I've tried everything I can think to do to fix it, and nothing has worked. I've never seen any of these issues on any other browsers, this is 100% a firefox problem.

I'm on the latest build of FF on Windows 10 and have the following plugins:

Bitwarden
UBlockOrigin
Simple Login
Multi-account Containers
ProtonVPN
Old Reddit Redirect
RES
Enhancer for Youtube

The issues I'm having:

Occasionally FF just hangs, won't respond to inputs, and the only way to recover it is to kill the process via control panel. When FF crashes like this I NEVER see the crash reporter, it's like FF thinks nothing happened and everything is fine.
Sometimes my tabs just don't work. Like, I'll open a tab, type something in to search it, and it just hangs. I had this problem for YEARS when FF was my daily browser before switching to brave 2 years back because it got too annoying. This issue is COMPLETELY RANDOM, and happens within 1 minute of making a new tab- sometimes it will happen when I first try to navigate anywhere inside the new tab, sometimes it happens after I'm in a website.
Sometimes FF refuses to start. I'll turn the computer on, click FF, and nothing will happen- then I'll go into control panel, kill the FF process, and try again until it works- usually when I do this the browser crashes at least once when it starts.

I can't make any sense of why this browser is so unstable for me, but it is SIGNIFICANTLY worse than it was last time I abandoned FF. I actually have FEWER addons than I did when I used FF as my daily driver before. If I can't figure this out this time I'm just not going to look back.

I have tried:

Safe mode. This seems to fix it for a bit, but eventually either tabs stop working or the browser crashes. I'm pretty confident this is NOT an issue with any of my plugins- I'm using either official FF ones (multi-account containers) or very reputable plugins from good sources.
Turning on/off hardware acceleration. This has no impact whatsoever
I have repeatedly deleted all cookies, history, and cache, and reset the startup cache.
Clean install FF
Refresh FF
Last time I tried to fix FF before switching to Brave, I found that having the FF Profiler running AT ALL TIMES actually seemed to make things a little bit better- but the profiler never once turned up anything useful.

I'm at my wits end here. I really want to be able to move off of chromium but FF is so incredibly annoying to use in its current state that I simply can't do that until I find fixes to these issues. Has anyone here got any clue what else I can do to try to diagnose this?

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[–] Tubbles 56 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I'd start by disabling the plugins one by one or a couple at a time to see if any of them might be the culprit

[–] [email protected] 52 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I prefer disable them all and see if it works. Then renewable one at a time.

This way you know straight away if that's maybe the issue.

[–] marcos 36 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Re-enable half of them at a time.

[–] legion 49 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

My man's out here binary search tree-ing his plugins, lol.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

More of a binary chop really.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

This is the correct way to troubleshoot electronics issues as well.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

This is my preferred method. Enable half, test for a couple days, swap to the other half, and try again. If the issue doesn’t present itself, then enabling all brings the issue back, it’s a conflict issue. Keep enabling different combinations such as odd/even, first/third quarter, etc until you narrow down the exact combo that can reproduce. With a lot of plugins having vocal communities, you could probably post to the two that have the conflict and one could figure out that the other is causing the symptom and maybe even fix it.

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[–] kite 27 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh man. Many, MANY years ago I had what certainty looks like an identical problem. I actually jumped so for several years because I couldn't stand it any longer and no one could help me. I'm trying to remember what I finally did that solved it, and I'm about 95% sure I had to create a brand new, clean profile. Just reinstalling or refreshing firefox did not do the trick, I had to make a new profile. It was so long ago that I have zero recollection of how to do even that anymore, but if I were you, I'd give it a shot .

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Yes this is the stock answer when FF starts getting weird. It's been a while since I have has to do it. I think they even have a tool to do it now.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Unfortunately this is 100% an issue with your system and not Firefox.

Edit: sorry if that reply wasn't helpful. Just calling it out to prevent the inevitable comments blaming Firefox itself lol.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I recently spilled water on my mouse. Everything seemed fine, but ff kept hanging more or less as you describe. Swapped out the mouse and it was fine.

Probably isn't your problem, just thought I'd let you know.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

This makes me seriously consider whether my mouse could be the problem; I may buy a new one soon anyways. My mouse sometimes does some WEIRD stuff, it's rather old.

... I'll have to consider this. I don't have a second mouse to use, so I can't test it rn.

I'm using a utechsmart venus for what its worth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

What the hell. I believe you but I'm so confused as to why that would happen lmao.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

I don't know exactly but it doesn't really surprise me honestly. water may have made an intermittent short (intermittent as in, a million times per second). imagine if a single actual click sent 3 million click signals.

Browsers have js hooks for mouse events. A poorly designed website (or a well designed one) could easily shit itself if you send 3 million clicks before it has processed the first one.

In my case it didn't seem to effect other apps but that may just be because the browser always had the focus whenever something glitched out.

I have no idea if this is likely or even possible but it seems like a plausible way that a mouse could fuck up a browser.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Any hardware can fuck up your system. Usually it's the driver's fault.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I'd run a memory test overnight.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Doing this now before bed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Memory test ran overnight and detected no issues.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I would disable any custom fonts you have added to Windows too. Or at least check them for font conflicts. And check the reliability reporter to see if it says anything in particular about the days when FF crashes.

EDIT: I also just noticed you have a VPN in your plugins. The Firefox VPN used to behave pretty wonkily if it got a bad connection and could look like everything was frozen. This would be my immediate prime suspect if you think it’s extensions.

I also agree a fresh profile is a huge pain but worth a shot if all else fails. It can make a difference when you can’t trace down what about:config you boned horribly haha.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Hmmmm that's a thought, though I'm not sure why my nice monospace font would break FF, it isn't using it. I may try this though, it's worth a shot...

[–] StewartGilligan 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Firefox (in my experience) does seem to lag on some devices especially ones that run older hardware. I have a really old Windows 7 laptop tucked away somewhere that had both Firefox and Chrome installed.

While Chrome runs like a hot knife through butter, I can't say the same about Firefox. I popped open a Windows 8 VM as well and Firefox still seems to run smoothly on that. On my relatively newer laptop, Firefox runs like a breeze.

One of the main culprits might be your hardware (most likely RAM) or your OS. If the above 2 aren't the issue, then I'd suggest making a new profile with no modifications and see how that runs. If that doesn't work then try using the Firefox Extended Support Release. It's known to be more stable and less frequent to crashes.

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[–] rbar 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Can you try using a tool like Crystal disk to check your drive health. Once when I had similar symptoms my drive was just weeks from failing completely.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Crystal Disk shows all of my drives as healthy

[–] emptyother 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Downloaded installer or MSStore? I had an issue for a short time (a single version then it got fixed) where only the Store version caused system stuttering.

Also maybe, you haven't messed with Windows virtual memory page sizing?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

There are some hidden MS plug-ins in the MS Store, lol. Better to get it straight from FF

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Works fine on my Mac and Linux machines. Maybe this is a Windows issue.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Not a debugging help, but: I have the same issues. Especially the tab thing. Open one, try to open a page, nothing happens. This is especially bad on android for me.

Number 3 is something Firefox has done for ages, even before quantum. It will refuse to start of there is another, non-responding, instance running. I think they actually added a dialog for it that sometimes works.

Number 1 is something I see on Linux every now and then. For me, only the mouse input is ignored then. But sometimes Firefox just hangs without crashing (Probably some loop somewhere went nuts).

I do not have solutions for this. I just want to add, that it probably is not because of OPs system.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You could try a VM with just Firefox to see if there's another program interfering with it?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

For what it's worth FF seems to work just fine with the same extensions on my laptop, which runs Mint. So it's most likely something with my desktop, but I haven't got a clue what.

[–] x4740N 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Do you get any other issues on your pc not related to firefox

Also note down the times the issues occur and look at the event viewer in Windows and look at the times you've noted down to see if you can see anything odd

The ideal way to troubleshoot is to get as much information as you can about the issue before you begin troubleshooting steps

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

The only other oddity I have is with my mouse. Sometimes it will do some weird thing, and I think it's the brand and it's drivers not being great. I've ordered a new one that should come today, and when it comes I plan on reinstalling windows. If that doesn't fix this... tbh nothing will.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Are you running this on the same PC/OS install that you were having problems on previously?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Something that may help with diagnosis is to try a portable version of firefox. If the portable version works properly and your installed version does not then it could be either some setting or library that is having problems.

Would also try running as a different user to see if maybe the issue is with something in your user profile.

[–] dditty 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The only issue I have with Firefox is on mobile (Android) swiping left or right in Google Image search results is totally broken. It's almost impossible to swipe left or right through the image results

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Can you reproduce the issue with no extensions running?

Can you reproduce the issue on a different machine?

Try to isolate the variables that are causing the issue.

Vanilla Firefox with no modifications, no extensions, nothing, does it reproduce the issue?

I'm not encountering issues like you're describing, so I think it's something specific to your environment

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Yeah. Do it methodically. And only change one setting / addon at a time or you're never going to figure out the cause.

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