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Mozilla Firefox Start Page causing extreme memory leaks?!

  • 4 replies
  • 6 have this problem
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  • Last reply by mario62746

mario62746
mario62746
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For some reason, when I open my Firefox today, it hangs so badly that I my whole computer also hangs... Even if I close and reopen Firefox, it still hangs... So the only option I have is to end the process... However, if you wait long enough after my Firefox hangs, it will not hang and work normally again. Because of this, I did a little investigation to know what could be the probable cause why my Firefox keeps on hanging at start-up, and I did find an answer to this. I found out that the Start Page of my Firefox was the main reason why it hangs. I concluded that because when I changed my homepage from the Start Page to a blank page, it doesn't hang, and whenever the Start Page is shown, I noticed that the process firefox.exe on my task manager goes way up to 1,000,000+ K of memory... which is obviously abnormal... So the question is, how do I fix this?

For some reason, when I open my Firefox today, it hangs so badly that I my whole computer also hangs... Even if I close and reopen Firefox, it still hangs... So the only option I have is to end the process... However, if you wait long enough after my Firefox hangs, it will not hang and work normally again. Because of this, I did a little investigation to know what could be the probable cause why my Firefox keeps on hanging at start-up, and I did find an answer to this. I found out that the Start Page of my Firefox was the main reason why it hangs. I concluded that because when I changed my homepage from the Start Page to a blank page, it doesn't hang, and whenever the Start Page is shown, I noticed that the process firefox.exe on my task manager goes way up to 1,000,000+ K of memory... which is obviously abnormal... So the question is, how do I fix this?

Chosen solution

See cor-el's response on my issue page (I had the same issue) for a solution which works:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/984223

Read this answer in context 👍 1

All Replies (4)

GreenOracle
GreenOracle
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I've got the exact same issue! I'm pretty sure it just started today too. It's so bizarre because we've all been using Firefox 26.0 for at least a month, right? How could the about:home page all of a sudden cause this issue?

I've been able to replicate this issue on a virtual machine running Windows XP SP3, so clearly it has nothing to do with Windows 7.

GreenOracle
GreenOracle
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Chosen Solution

See cor-el's response on my issue page (I had the same issue) for a solution which works:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/984223

cor-el
cor-el
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See also Firefox hangs on the default Start Page: [/questions/984193]

mario62746
mario62746 Question owner
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Finally! No more hangs on Start Page!!!

What I did exactly: 1. On about:config, I modified "browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl" and replaced it with an empty string. 2. I deleted the folder "moz-safe-about+home" located at \storage\persistent\ of my Firefox's profile folder. 3. Restart Firefox.

Thank you all for the helpful replies!!!