How to stop Firefox from hanging and lagging?
I have tried nearly everything I have seen suggested so far, but nothing seems to work. Firefox started hanging and lagging randomly a few days ago. When scrolling, hovering over buttons, clicking and typing, there tends to be a half-second or 1 second delay. Youtube videos and other video websites are basically unwatchable because they lag so much.
So far I have tried:
- starting firefox in safemode - resetting firefox - using hardware accelleration and not using hardware acceleration to see if there was any changes. - disabling all plugins and extensions and disabling each one-by-one to see if any took up a lot of memory usage. (Firefox memory usage was sometimes over 400 Mb) - downloading a freeware program called "Firemin" which apparently stops memory leaks when used to launch firefox. (Memory usage went from 350-400 Mb to 4-8 Mb !) This helped slightly when watching youtube videos but not with any other hanging and lagging problems.
I'm currently using Firefox 22.0.
Please if you have any suggestions respond because I do not want to have to resort to using Chrome. I am too used to using firefox and don't want to lose my bookmarks.
All Replies (8)
Hello,
Certain Firefox problems can be solved by performing a Clean reinstall. This means you remove Firefox program files and then reinstall Firefox. Please follow these steps:
Note: You might want to print these steps or view them in another browser.
- Download the latest Desktop version of Firefox from http://www.mozilla.org and save the setup file to your computer.
- After the download finishes, close all Firefox windows (click Exit from the Firefox or File menu).
- Delete the Firefox installation folder, which is located in one of these locations, by default:
- Windows:
- C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
- Mac: Delete Firefox from the Applications folder.
- Linux: If you installed Firefox with the distro-based package manager, you should use the same way to uninstall it - see Install Firefox on Linux. If you downloaded and installed the binary package from the Firefox download page, simply remove the folder firefox in your home directory.
- Windows:
- Now, go ahead and reinstall Firefox:
- Double-click the downloaded installation file and go through the steps of the installation wizard.
- Once the wizard is finished, choose to directly open Firefox after clicking the Finish button.
Please report back to see if this helped you!
Thank you.
Will all of my bookmarks be lost if I reinstall firefox? That's the main reason I haven't tried it yet.
you can store them. see: Export Firefox bookmarks to an HTML file to back up or transfer bookmarks
and if every thing works fine you can import them. see Import Bookmarks from a HTML file
I reinstalled and it does not appear to have worked. For some reason I did not have to import bookmarks or reinstall plugins and extensions as everything was how I left it before uninstalling. I am still getting hanging and lagging as I am typing this and I tried watching youtube videos they were still lagging. I know this is not a system problem because I can view videos fine in other programs like vlc and I can type without lag in microsoft word.
Try to boot the computer in Windows Safe Mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.
UPDATE: PROBLEM FIXED
It was not a firefox problem all along. About 4 months ago I disabled automatic updates on my laptop because one of them would not install properly and kept rebooting the computer over and over again. I found the update causing the problem, managed to disable it, and installed the other 54 "important updates" that have been waiting to be installed for 4 months. It would have been so obvious if I didn't think it was just firefox that was causing problems. So happy right now.
bold text Could I be guided through the process you went to solve this problem because I've done anti-spyware scans,defragmenting, deleting Tempt files with little to short term affects. The Add-ons I have on my browser are Noscript(blocks scripts) and Nosquint(makes text bigger or smaller) I've also done a Full system restore believing that would fix the problem only after I started downloading programs like Firefox,Messengers,etc...the annoyance came back. Could you please help me?
Hi nathanr89
Could you please start a new thread for your question instead of posting in an existing thread?
Then you can provide more information like your operating system and installed extensions and installed plugins.
In case of crashes also please add some recent crash IDs that you can find on the about:crashes page and that start with a "bp-" prefix