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Firefox goes berserk!

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by daniel, Oct 8, 2011.

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  1. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    I was in MapQuest, playing with a route, moving it around, etc. When suddenly my hard drive started running more than normal, more or less nonstop. I thought it was Google Earth doing it, so I quit that program. That didn't do it so I quit FF. Only FF didn't quit. The window closed but the bar at the top of the screen showed it still active, and the HD kept running. I blamed MapQuest. I used Force Quit, at which point the HD stopped running. I opened FF again, and the MQ window reappeared. I closed that window, which was VERY slow to respond, but finally did close, but the HD kept running. Again, Quit didn't work and I had to Force Quit. Again, the HD stopped when FF finally quit. Now, with MapQuest finally not in a FF window, I opened FF again, but again the HD started up and would not stop. I had to Force Quit again.

    I moved Firefox.app to the trash, and downloaded a fresh copy from Mozilla, but the same thing happened. I have not yet deleted my user data, because I didn't want to lose my bookmarks and cookies. I'm using Chrome right now. I posted a query on the Mozilla help forum. That's all volunteers, so I imagine it may take a while for someone to respond.

    In the mean time, if anyone has ideas, they'd be appreciated. Nothing seems affected except Firefox. Version is 7.0.1. I actually don't remember if I had the latest version when the problem occurred, but with the re-install, I do now. OS is OS X 10.6.8.
     
    #1 daniel, Oct 8, 2011
  2. TonyPSchaefer

    TonyPSchaefer Your Friendly Moderator
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    I have noticed at work that when I leave Ff open for a while it can start consuming memory. Closing it makes a major drop in allocated memory. Work is on WinXP.

    I've ever had your experience happen at home on my Mac.
     
    #2 TonyPSchaefer, Oct 8, 2011
  3. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    I'm considering replacing Firefox and its user data from my last backup before the problem. Of course I'd back up the new user data before replacing. I've been lax on my backups. My last one was a month ago.

    This is not an issue of FF consuming memory. It's accessing the HD constantly and refusing to quit unless forced.
     
    #3 daniel, Oct 8, 2011
  4. Stev0

    Stev0 Honorary Hong Kong Cavalier

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    On both a Mac with 10.6 and on a Vista machine, Firefox would sometimes slow to a crawl for no particular reason. Now I'm using Chrome and I haven't had any problems in 10.6, 10.7, Windows XP, or Vista.
     
    #4 Stev0, Oct 8, 2011
  5. dogfriend

    dogfriend Human - Animal Hybrid

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    Daniel

    Make sure to throw away all of the preference files for your former version of Firefox before you install the new copy. You might want to make a backup of them under a different name to save bookmarks and stuff.

    I have to say that Firefox is one of the more buggy programs that I use on the Mac. Even though the latest versions seem to be better, it is still reluctant to close sometimes and requires a Force Quit.
     
    #5 dogfriend, Oct 8, 2011
  6. Troyroy

    Troyroy Member

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    I have been a FF user for years.......running Mac os 10.4 right now.....with FF 3.6.8......don't have any problems.....

    Your problems must be with a newer version. ???
     
    #6 Troyroy, Oct 9, 2011
  7. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    Current version of FF is 7.0.1.
     
    #7 daniel, Oct 9, 2011
  8. Corwyn

    Corwyn Energy Curmudgeon

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    Actually, that could well be a symptom of a memory leak (consuming too much memory). What happens is that all available memory is claimed, the OS pages some of it out to the hard disk, and calls are made to that memory faster than it can be moved back and forth to the disk.
     
    #8 Corwyn, Oct 9, 2011
  9. xs650

    xs650 Senior Member

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    FF 7.0.1 is a memory leaker on my PC. It was hogging 384k of memory when I finally shut it down this morning. Its back up to 254k right now.
     
    #9 xs650, Oct 9, 2011
  10. SageBrush

    SageBrush Senior Member

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    I have simlar problems with Chrome on the Mac, and it actually pushed me back to using FF. By the way, Chrome on Windows works really, really well.

    If opening and closing the app is not enough, then restart the Mac.

    All and all, I find Safari the most stable on the mac. My only reason not to make it my usual browser is due to my engrained habit of using the tab key to pick a URL from the drop-down list, a feature not supported on Safari.
     
    #10 SageBrush, Oct 9, 2011
  11. Mark57

    Mark57 2021 Tesla Model 3 LR AWD

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    I'm running FF 7.0.1 on Win 7 64 bit and it runs at a consistent 156-158K when browsing this forum. Yes, I'm running a lot of extensions and plug-ins.

    It's hard to compare between machines accurately unless you compare it with the exact same set of add-ons, extensions, and plug-ins OR if everyone measure its memory usage by restarting with add-ons disabled.
     
    #11 Mark57, Oct 10, 2011
  12. mgb4tim

    mgb4tim Noob

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    I've been running FF since shortly after it was introduced, but with the past few updates, I find it killing my machine more and more often. Switched to chrome, and I've had less and less issues.
     
    #12 mgb4tim, Oct 10, 2011
  13. eagle33199

    eagle33199 Platinum Member

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    I've fully switched to Chrome on my Macbook... It's lighter weight that FireFox, and tends to run everything a little quicker.
     
    #13 eagle33199, Oct 10, 2011
  14. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    At SageBrush's suggestion I restarted my Mac. (Always a good idea. Don't know why it hadn't occurred to me.) Didn't help. So I went ahead and restored FF from my backup from before the issue. Didn't help. So I backed up and then restored the Profiles file. Didn't help. So I restored the entire FF folder in Library\Application Support from the backup. Didn't help.

    So I've set Chrome as my default browser. Goodbye Firefox. I really liked you. :(
     
    #14 daniel, Oct 10, 2011
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  15. northwichita

    northwichita .

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    My computer has been slowing down and I've been running firefox, I thought I just needed to buy a new updated computer. I did a web search on this, this advise I used, clear the save history browsing setting in privacy settings. I did this, and now no slow computer problems.

    click tools, options, privacy, custom settings, then unclicked--remember my browsing history.

    Sped things up, though does takes a little to find previous viewed web pages.

    Edit, computer still slows with too many pages open, I will upgrade, someday.
     
    #15 northwichita, Oct 10, 2011
  16. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    Thanks, but this is not a computer slow-down. Everything else runs fine. Just Firefox starts to access the HD and just won't stop, and won't even quit. I'm done with FF unless and until Mozilla figures out the problem and fixes it. It's not like there's any inconvenience in dumping FF. Chrome works fine and I had no reason other than habit for not using it before. In fact, I was already using it for a few web sites that did not render properly in FF.
     
    #16 daniel, Oct 10, 2011
  17. Pinto Girl

    Pinto Girl New Member

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    FF 7.0.1 doesn't seem to be exhibiting those problems on my three year old MacBook Pro. And it seems lots less buggy than 6.0, which seemed slow and hung a lot. I'm a bit behind on system software though: 10.5.8.
     
    #17 Pinto Girl, Oct 12, 2011
  18. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    No matter. It might have been something totally arcane on my computer, related to a million-to-one event regarding the interaction between FF and MapQuest, or a three-way interaction involving OS X. But a re-install didn't help, and going back to a month-old backup of FF and its user data didn't help. And Chrome works just fine. So Firefox is history on my computer, and for no particular reason except that it comes from the same folks, so is Thunderbird, as I'm now using Mail, which came with OS X.
     
    #18 daniel, Oct 12, 2011
  19. Stev0

    Stev0 Honorary Hong Kong Cavalier

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    Now install Open Office and TextWrangler and you're using what I use 99% of the time on my Mac.
     
    #19 Stev0, Oct 12, 2011
  20. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    I don't know Text Wrangler. I used OpenOffice on my PC and my Linux laptop. I ran into some confusion looking for OpenOffice on the Mac, so I use NeoOffice. I'm not entirely sure if NeoOffice is a direct port of OpenOffice, or a separate project that shares some or a lot of code.

    Back in the day I used WordStar. Then it disappeared, and on my sister's recommendation I switched to WordPerfect. Then it disappeared and I switched to OpenOffice and then (for the Mac) NeoOffice. I'm quite happy with the latter.
     
    #20 daniel, Oct 12, 2011
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