Firefox unresponsive when waking laptop from hibernate
My issue seems to be the same or very similar to previous threads that have since been closed.
For a few months, maybe a year I've been having problems when resuming my laptop from hibernate. Essentially every open program hangs for at least a few minutes on resume. After some experimenting I noticed that it seemed to be Firefox and Thunderbird that were the contributors to this. In both programs I get an unresponsive script warning 5-10 minutes after waking from hibernate. If I was not running either program when hibernating then I have no problems. If I use sleep instead of hibernate I also generally don't seem to have any problems (but I can't swear that it hasn't ever happened after resuming from sleep).
The below thread seems to match my symptoms the closest. Like him I am also running Windows 7 64bit.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/944816?esab=a&as=aaq
This thread is also very similar symptoms, but in their case it seems to have been an issue using sleep, not hibernate. This particular issue was reported as fixed in Firefox 23, but I'm still seeing an issue on my end running 23.0.1.
I have tried running in safe mode and still experience the issue. Like others have reported, this doesn't happen 100% of the time, but more like 90%. It seems that it happens more consistently and it takes longer to recover the more tabs I have open in Firefox. The issue is less consistent with Thunderbird, but still happens maybe 60-70% of the time.
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When Windows hibernates, time stops. Or does it? The speculation about this kind of problem is that Firefox tries to "catch up" on tasks that were missed during the period of hibernation, such as actions scheduled by scripts. Not all pages refresh themselves or attempt to do other kinds of dynamic updates, so not all users seem to be affected. I don't know whether you can spot a pattern related to the sites you have open when this problem occurs, but if you can, that might be helpful in resolving this.
Meanwhile, another option might be to File>Exit Firefox before hibernating and rely on session restore to get your open windows and tabs back. Nervous? I would be, too, since session restore occasionally fails. You can use an extension like Session Manager to improve the odds of successful restoration. It also might make it easier to experiment since you could create a new small session for testing, then roll back to your earlier "real" session.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manager/
Thanks Jscher, I appreciate the response. It does seem that the system hangs for an especially long time if I have sites open that use a 3rd party comment system like DIsqus. Although for testing purposes I opened just a couple of about:blank tabs and the system still hung, although it seemed to be for a much shorter period of time. The same kind of behavior happens with Thunderbird as well, but I haven't been able to detect any kind of pattern there.
The suggestion to exit before hibernating is a good one. and it is something I do try to do. I only have two problems with this workaround, both self-inflicted. 1) The normal case I'm hibernating is when I'm running out of a meeting, usually late for the next one and I just quickly shut my laptop, which is set to hibernate by default. I could set it to sleep instead of hibernate when I close the lid, but I've been reluctant to do that because I've been burned before when I haven't been able to come back to the computer for a day or two and open it up to a mostly dead battery. 2) I have my browser set to erase all private data on close, and the session restore kind of destroys the usefulness of that. ;)