Firefox Freezing on Macbook (el-capitan)
Firefox either hangs and/or fails to fully shutdown on OSX. Force Quit function of OSX has no effect. The Firefox icon remains as if active, rendering the laptop unable to power down by normal means. The only way to power down is to press and hold the hardware Power Button.
System: Macbook Pro 13" SSD running OSX El-Capitan 10.11.2. Firefox version 44.0.
Modified by Bryan D.
All Replies (2)
Hi Bryan D. , You can take a back up of the profile Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles and try a clean reinstall:
Certain Firefox problems can be solved by performing a Clean reinstall. This means you remove your Firefox program files and then reinstall Firefox. This process does not remove your Firefox profile data (such as bookmarks and passwords), since that information is stored in a different location.
To do a clean reinstall of Firefox, please follow these steps: Note: You might want to print these steps or view them in another browser.
- Download the latest Desktop version of Firefox from mozilla.org (or choose the download for your operating system and language from this page) and save the setup file to your computer.
- After the download finishes, close all Firefox windows (or open the Firefox menu
and click the close button 
).
- Delete the Firefox installation folder, which is located in one of these locations, by default:
- Windows:
- C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
- Mac: Delete Firefox from the Applications folder.
- Linux: If you installed Firefox with the distro-based package manager, you should use the same way to uninstall it - see Install Firefox on Linux. If you downloaded and installed the binary package from the Firefox download page, simply remove the folder firefox in your home directory.
- Windows:
- Now, go ahead and reinstall Firefox:
- Double-click the downloaded installation file and go through the steps of the installation wizard.
- Once the wizard is finished, choose to directly open Firefox after clicking the Finish button.
More information about reinstalling Firefox can be found here.
WARNING: Do not use a third party uninstaller as part of this process. Doing so could permanently delete your Firefox profile data, including but not limited to, extensions, cache, cookies, bookmarks, personal settings and saved passwords. These cannot be easily recovered unless they have been backed up to an external device! See Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles.
Please report back to say if this helped you!
Thank you.
Despite removing the software from my Mac, downloading the latest version and doing a fresh install; Firefox still hangs upon exit with absolutely no means of force-quitting. The browser cannot be re-started either. Only a hard re-boot of the laptop works.