Mozilla VPN is currently experiencing an outage. Our team is actively working to resolve the issue. Please check the status page for real-time updates. Thank you for your patience.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

firefox gets glitchy when open too long

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by philipp

more options

When I open firefox it works fine. If I leave it alone long enough it starts to get glitchy, like when I scroll down a fully loaded page, it take a few seconds to scroll down. I have to restart firefox to fix it. I can't just close it either. I have to go to windows task manager to end its process. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling firefox, but that didn't work either.

When I open firefox it works fine. If I leave it alone long enough it starts to get glitchy, like when I scroll down a fully loaded page, it take a few seconds to scroll down. I have to restart firefox to fix it. I can't just close it either. I have to go to windows task manager to end its process. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling firefox, but that didn't work either.

All Replies (2)

more options

Have you tried:

Edit > Preferences

Advanced > Browsing

  • "Use hardware acceleration when available" [uncheck/check]
  • "Use smooth scrolling" [uncheck]

Hardware acceleration can both be a benefit and a bottleneck, so try both options if your problem persists.

Other than that, I think you should try to minimize your tab-usage to save memory.

On Windows 7 systems, press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to bring up the logon screen where you can choose the "Start Task Manager" option.

Sort by CPU or Memory and identify the largest consumers. Close the applications and services you don't use. If your CPU usage is above 50% or your memory above 50-80% Firefox doesn't have a chance to process a large page with alot of elements smoothly.

Modified by dza

more options

hello, addons can cause memory leaks that lead to the behaviour that you have described. which extensions have you installed in firefox > addons > extensions & does the same thing happen when you run firefox in safe mode?

Firefox hangs or is not responding - How to fix

(firefox devs have recently made a breakthrough in stopping addons from leaking memory, which is being tested at the moment. the changes will ship in firefox 15 which is due late august)