Hi mx3design,
Sorry you are having problems with your Firefox hanging.

The problem is likely to be on your own setup, and not a fault of Firefox. I rarely use Win7 64 bit but is is not giving me any noticeable problems when I do.

The majority of Windows 7 users will have few if any problems with Firefox, other than maybe FlashPlayer related ones.
Do you use FlashPlayer ?

The problem with trying to research this is that with close on 1/2 Billion users of Firefox almost any problem you may think of will be seen by some set of users, and probably with multiple causes.

Anti Virus etc.
Running without AV may prevent some problems. Running with competing incompatible AV will produce problems. Malware aquired after use with no security precautions will cause problems.

Can you give some indication of how often or severe these random crashes are ?

Try FirefoxReset,

• Reset Firefox preferences to troubleshoot and fix problems

If that fails then my first guess at the likely problem is that you have some as yet undetected malware have a look at this post as a suggestion of detailed steps to check for malware with multiple tools

• /questions/914980#answer-302372
• general info Troubleshoot Firefox issues caused by malware

Thanks for the reply John.

I have tested with and without Flash I have run malware scans using several different clients and don't believe my platform is infected. I have tested with and without AV/firewall protection; my system is not left permanently vulnerable. I have uninstalled, reinstalled, manually deleted all profiles etc etc

There are many threads regarding this problem, it is affecting many users and I'm afraid I have lost patience now. I'm now using chrome.. it works!

If you were to continue to use Firefox you could enable telemetry. That would not directly help you, but it does help the Firefox engineers, because they get realworld data.

We do know from the telemetry data that the majority of win 7 users are NOT having these problems. (Or at least not the ones with telemetry enabled - fx beta has telemetry on by default).

We also know from feedback commentsdata that this is not a major problem although we have noticed a slight increase in users reporting Firefox 15 and 16 as being slow.

• Share data with Mozilla to help improve Firefox

Some of these problems are difficult to track down and fix. Often they relate to third party software used with Firefox, but telemetry was developed and introduced after some Firefox regression problems were missed.

Good luck with using Chrome.

This may help anyone seeing this thread with a similar issue - I have a solution which seems to be working which is to run Firefox as an admin in XP service pack 2 compatibility mode: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Make-older-programs-run-in-this-version-of-Windows

Since doing this the hangs have stopped. I've been writing programs and coding since the late 1970's. It's a real shame that Firefox developers won't recognise the bug there is DEFINITELY a problem!!

My advice if you're having similar issues is to switch to Chrome, lots of the development tools have been ported now. If enough people stop using FF they might showing an interest in fixing it.

I am having the precise problem mx3design describes. I am running the same version, and on the same OS. I too have tried updating my plugins and scanning for malware (I also tried upgrading firefox, as the problem started with Firefox version 15.)

I'll try the solutions posted here to fix the problem. However, I just posted to further emphasize that this is a problem affecting more of us than just mx3design. A bug that only shows up on a minority of machines but makes the software unusable on those machines IS STILL A BUG.

Turn off Firefox's use of Hardware Acceleration and see if that solves the problem ?

• Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems
  • if turning of HA solves the problems check the graphics drivers are up-to-date Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL

If turning of HA solves the problem probably no need to read any further.

 A bug that only shows up on a minority of machines but makes the software unusable on those machines IS STILL A BUG. 

I agree it may still be a bug even if it only affects a minority of users, unfortunately however not all bugs get a fix.To be even on the starting blocks with any chance of it being looked into as a bug you probably need;

1. Clear and simple Steps To Reproduce.
   We need to be able to demonstrate the problem so that an engineer may see this problem occurring.
2. Up to date software.
   I understand Windows XP should now be on SP3. Although Firefox should support XP >= SP2 it may be rather naive to expect a fix if the tests are only demonstrating problems on SP2.
3. Compatibility mode
   try to find out precisely what minimal settings changes are required as a workaround to fix this issue.

Compatibility Mode You should not need to use this,and it may introduce further complications. But it is also potentially useful for troubleshooting if you are able to discover what settings need changing as a workaround. It quite likely is a graphics change.

• see also http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?ln=en-gb&c2=1173

Up to Date Software
I am sure it would be useful if you can demonstrate on XP sp2 to then also try on

• an up to date supported XP that means SP3
• on Firefox nightly, if it turns out the problem does not occur on nightly then it has already been fixed and the fix can be expected to work its way up into the release in a few months time

Steps to Reproduce
not much to add, we need to demonstrate the problem

Profiler
Note also there is a new profiler that works in some Firefox versions, and although unlikely to help many end users it may provide useful information for anyone trying to triage and debug hang issues.

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/gecko-profiler/