Hello Adam.

You may be having a problem with some Firefox add-on that is hindering your Firefox's normal behavior. Have you tried disabling all add-ons (just to check), to see if Firefox goes back to normal?

Whenever you have a problem with Firefox, whatever it is, you should make sure it's not coming from one of your installed add-ons, be it an extension, a theme or a plugin. To do that easily and cleanly, run Firefox in safe mode and select Disable all add-ons. If the problem disappears, you know it's from an add-on. Disable them all in normal mode, and enable them one at a time until you find the source of the problem. See this article for information about troubleshooting extensions and theme. You can troubleshoot plugins the same way.

If you want support for one of your add-ons, you'll need to contact its author.

This advice did not help. What else could be wrong. This is becoming ridiculous!!!

I have the same issue and it still crashes in safe mode.

I do not know if this will help anyone, but try this... Start>Run

type in "firefox.exe -p" without the quotes

create a new profile... this will be completely blank with no addons and such... try to see if this helps at all, if not, a reinstall may be needed. if that doesn't fix it, maybe it's just the current version.

I am having this problem with Opera but not with Firefox. It makes Opera unusable. One thought I have is that a dead DNS or other cache server is being used, and you get a timeout and a backup kicks in and works.

Yippeee!!!!!!!!!!!! I solved the issue!!!! I didn't know what the hell Windows defender was. I have F-Secure antivirus that I pay for through my ISP because I like it and never realized that this Defender was running as well. I think the problem was due to two antivirus programs running at the same time because when I disabled the Defender I haven't had the problem since. I hope this works for you guys....totaljustice out!!

I've got Firefox 3.6.13 -- and I notice that when it hangs, the status bar shows things like "Connecting to webtrends" or to various google tracking services, or "Read static.addons.mozilla.org". I can't do anything in Firefox until it's done transferring. Often, various services and trackers connect and transfer one after another, not concurrently, resulting in several hangs per web page.

-- BUT Firefox also hangs when I open a blank new tab, or when I switch between tabs of pages that have already been loaded and visited and the page status is "Done".

A browser should not hang like this for any reason. I can't scroll or use a toolbar or open a menu item... can't take any action even though it has nothing to do with web pages or data transfers.

The Ghostery add-on is able to take away some of the problem, but it doesn't remove it entirely.

Does anyone know if Firefox 4 will get rid of this performance issue? Earlier versions never had it, but I know I've seen it from at least FF 3.5 and up.