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ArcticMyst Security by Avery

Mozilla Firefox running glitchy and slow-y

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Feb 5, 2008
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Hey people,

Googled the internet upside down, no dice.

Anyway I'm experiencing some weird crap with my Firefox. It keeps alternating between "Running fine" and "Viewing my own monitor through TeamViewer" performance. Gamer's estimation is that it drops down to about 10-12 Frames per second, completely disregarding any content on any tab.

It runs about 15-20 seconds fine, 25-35 seconds slugishly, on average.

It appears to be completely unrelated to background processes, antivirus, firewall, CPU or Memory usage. That much I ruled out.

It is the newest 18.0 version of Firefox, no addons except Adblock installed, no themes and no customizations.

The glitchiness is apparently random, and affects the complete page I'm viewing, most notably scrolling. I tell you people, scrolling at 10 FPS will make your eyes bleed.

Not to mention the second of input lag so text typing becomes incredibly frustrating.

I've tried clearing the cache, running CCleaner, making sure there is nothing else running in background, nothing helps.

It appears to be only happening on my laptop. Back home on PC, with exact same firefox version, running perfectly fine.

Also amazingly, the video playing on Youtube will run fine while the rest of the page is incredibly sluggish and glitchy.

I've ran out of options and things to try and I'm kinda hoping somebody might have encountered this before and can help me out.

And NO I'm not gonna switch to another browser, period.
 





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It used to be that Firefox would become sluggish over time on my system too. The first thing to check is whether your addons are causing any problems. Try launching the browser in safe-mode and see if the problem persists over longer browsing sessions. If you see a difference, restart the browser in regular mode, and then disable your add-ons or extensions and turn them on one at a time. A good place to start is to see if Adobe's Shockwave flash plugin is causing problems. I've outright disabled Flash on Firefox and just watch stuff on Chrome because it was annoying me by stealing my mouse focus and other stuff.

Other things to try is type "about:config" into your URL bar and see if you have any special settings that could be affecting things. Also try clearing your caches. Maybe it's accessing them a lot on the disk and that's causing problems especially if on a congested drive. Are you using an SSD? Make sure you have enough space on that (10-15% free) to avoid slowdowns.
 
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No addons to speak of like I said, save for Adblock.

Space might be a problem since I'm currently going on what, 2GB free on C: drive :p But I regularily clear the cache and the offline data and it shouldn't be a problem.

I dunno, if worst comes to worst, disabling flash obviously means switching browsers, under a very optimistic assumtion Chrome runs better on limited resources.
 
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Well you probably don't need to switch browsers. Is that 2GB on an SSD? Those SSDs definitely need more space free. You can usually just keep data and other stuff on other drives using something like a directory junction if you need to retain the same symbolic location. I've got stuff scattered all over my computer even if it still looks like it is on the C drive.

What is your computer running BTW? I've had Firefox act sluggish even with all the memory and space in the world. I think it has some internal memory fragmentation related to scripts and stuff.

Also, when you stated above the time that it starts running sluggish, is that ~30 seconds after start-up? Or does it occur some time after?

If worst comes to worst, you could remake your Firefox profile. Maybe there are some old settings affecting things.
 
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On a 4 and half year old $800 laptop, SSD? Hehehe hells nah.

'Tis running Windows 7 32 bits and uhh, I dunno I don't think it would matter now, after running for 3 and half years flawlessly. There was no software or hardware change, no upgrade or downgrade, no problems, no issues.

The only logical thing I can think of is some Firefox's regular update messing up something but it's been a whole while since it said it's installing some updates. You know, standard message.

The slowdown lasts some 30-40 seconds on average, in between normal running about same time.

Sometimes it'll run for 2 hours fine, sometimes it'll glitch around for an hour straight. But average is about half minute-half minute.

I've monitored the CPU, memory and HDD usage via Resource monitor and what can I say? There are no spikes in activity, no lag, no hard faults, no extra HDD or processor usage. There's virtually no evidence that ANYTHING is happening at all, except for the fact that Firefox appears to consider "Rendering itself" not to be an overly important thing and will get back to it after a few million clock cycles of procrastinating.
 
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Hey I've got an SSD in three 5-year old laptops. They make the laptops feel brand new. I'd say it is the most significant upgrade to my main laptop, and is the reason I'm still using it. Yes, they are definitely worth it on any laptop -- or computer for that matter.

Maybe the rendering engine has some issues. Try going into about:config and change the following setting to true:

gfx.direct2d.disabled
 
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Alright, did, I'll let you know after a day of usage or so if it's better or not.
 

ped

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When BB said try running with add-ons disabled, that's sound advice, whether you only have ad block enabled or not. It's one more thing to eliminate.

I loved firefox until I used chrome, and now I wouldn't use anything else.
 
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Though I use Chrome for watching videos and other stuff because it is so fast, Chrome unfortunately has an inferior extensions system. One extension that has kept me firmly in the Firefox camp is the Tree Style Tabs extension, which is just excellent. The analogous extension for Chrome simply doesn't cut it.

Chrome's interface is actually pretty annoying in general. For one, it doesn't have a titlebar so I can read the title of the current tab. At least in FF I can turn the titlebar back on, despite their attempts to fall to the dark side. The tabs in Chrome (as with most horizontally tabbed browsers) only show about 200px worth of title when there are a few tabs, and the tab titles are virtually unreadable when there are more than 10 or so tabs -- a pitifully small amount in my normal usage. The unreadability of tab titles is the major failing of all horizontal tabs, and it's a reason I also have my taskbar on the left side of my screen instead of on the bottom. Google has also removed side-tabs from Chrome, so that's not an options.

Google has this terrible habit of removing or outright breaking good functionality in their programs and search. For search, an example is their buggy search engine that doesn't have working site-blocking functionality to help me block shit-sites like eHow. They also removed the + operator from search which is (was) used to make a term required. They also tend to pull the plug on stuff after a time, such as Google Wave. Watch as they terminate Google + when it doesn't meet expectations. Why would anyone sign up with their social network with that kind of history?
 
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Well, so far so good, the GFX 2D Acceleration appears to have done the trick, I have not experienced any slowdowns yet.

Treetab looks a bit overkill, I'm perfectly fine with current layout of tabs, menus and titles. Also in contrast to Chrome, you can move Firefox's elements around like Lego bricks. Right-click near the menu bar (above tabs), and select Customize. You can now move around interface elements, remove or add new ones.

I'm surprised by how few of people know of this. I moved some buttons around to have it like I want, refresh and stop buttons are seperate and near forward and back buttons on the left, on the right there's nothing, I removed the Google toolbar and Favorites toolbars since I never use favorites for anything, simply CTRL-T (new tab), first two letters of where I want to go, Enter.

URL reccomendations also works unbelivably well. "SH" returns my Shop which I visit frequently to check prices, "la" returns my own Control Panel, "yo" is Youtube homepage, any first two letters of a song or video returns that youtube's video...

I dunno how they did it, appears to be done from frequency of visits to something, also choosing another suggestion makes it appear first next time, etc etc. All in all, Chrome doesn't really meet my expectations like this.

Also, Mass Effect personas and skins. Unreplaceable.
 
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And NO I'm not gonna switch to another browser, period.
May I ask why? Some months ago I was pretty pissed about the sluggishness of Chrome, and all suggestions about how to accelerate it were things I had already done. Then I googled "fast browsers" and found a site where it was said that Opera was a lot faster than Chrome, Firefox and IE. I thought "Yeah, like that's gonna make any difference..." but I downloaded Opera anyway. When I tried it, it was SO much faster than Chrome that I couldn't believe I'd wasted so much time with futile attempts instead of implementing a radical solution.
 
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Because I've been using this one for 3 and half years straight. All my passwords, profiles, URL reccomendations which I'm terribly fond of and interface is tailored to my liking. I'm not gonna throw that away.

However, opinion is much appreciated. Might consider it in future. Who knows?
 

ped

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However, opinion is much appreciated. Might consider it in future. Who knows?

Nothing stopping you running it alongside FF?

What I like about Chrome is, all the personalizations, extensions, add-ons & favorites go with me to any computer I use which has Chrome, I just sign in, and its all there.
 
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Nothing stopping you running it alongside FF?

That's what I do. Firefox often has these momentary pauses after long sessions (it was really bad in FF3), and while that can be annoying in regular usage, it really affects Flash video playback. I also don't like the plugin grabbing my mouse scrolling and cursor, so I rely on Chrome for video playback.

I also have Chrome as my "default browser" even though I use Firefox as my main browser. Chrome launches so fast that I prefer it for displaying sites launched from Explorer or from my email client -- rather than wait for Firefox to allocate a new tab or window.

One critical feature of Chrome that was very important to me for a while was that it could be installed and updated without elevated privileges. I have a number of computers for family members that I try to keep updated, but I don't always have the time to update things as an elevated admin. One day, to my horror, I found that Firefox was about a year old in updates, including many updates that patched major security flaws. This was because you couldn't update Firefox without having an elevated account (I think it's different now). That episode made me switch family members to Chrome. Chrome also didn't eat up as many system resources, causing crashes, on those old machines like Firefox did.
 
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For search, an example is their buggy search engine that doesn't have working site-blocking functionality to help me block shit-sites like eHow.
I noticed that too. For that, I have to add, for example, "-ehow" if the results show too many hits from that site. But of course, it would be preferrable to have it block results once and forever, instead of repeating the exclusion for every search.
They also removed the + operator from search which is (was) used to make a term required.
For that, you need to enclose the term within quotes even when it's just a single word instead of a phrase.
 
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