Every time I select a tab it relods. How can I stop this?
I open a new tab and the page populates, great. I click away on another tab and a few minutes later come back to original and it is a blank page that has to completely reload again. I want it to just remain loaded and not reload each time I select the tab. Help me stop this, it's slowing me waaaaay down. Thanks, Bob
All Replies (4)
This issue can be caused by an extension that isn't working properly.
Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions ("3-bar" menu button or Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem.
- switch to the DEFAULT theme: "3-bar" menu button or Tools -> Add-ons -> Appearance
- do NOT click the "Refresh Firefox" button on the Safe Mode start window
ok, so what do we do when this isn't caused by and extension?
I do not think this is an extension problem. I say this because I stopped it several times by changing a few settings in about:config, until the next update.
I could then temporarily stop it by finding the -new- settings the developers added each time to cause it again. I cannot find the ones causing it now. As it is, the ones I have changed are added in strange places in the config to cause this. Either that, or it's built in now (and can't be stopped by the config).
The developers are very determined to take away the reload controls for the tabs. I'm assuming this has something to do with making something look faster, or smoother, or whatever without actually knowing how to do it right. No, I don't know how to make it work, but I'm not writing and distributing FF.
Actually blaming it on extensions is very humorous, because FF has hobbled the extension functionality so much by now that I find it unlikely that an extension would even be able to do so (I'm being sarcastic here).
Good programming does not require "refreshing," by the way.
To name a real possible culprit, it may be that when some things were pulled out (like the ability to stop forced redirects) it also pulled out the ability to stop forced reloads. Some of my tabs don't act this way, others do (but again I have changed multiple things in the config).
What changes did you previously made to prefs on about:config that worked?
There are on_demand prefs that determine what happens if you start Firefox, but if pages require reloading that that could indicate that memory used by these tabs would be cleared if they haven't been focused for a specific time. I've never seen this happen in a way that the page needs reloading although it might be possible that content was swapped top the page/swap file and that this needs to be reloaded from the hard drive of that images or other active content need to be redrawn.