this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Firefox

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I switched back to firefox last week because I wanted to get away from Chromium. I was previously using Brave.

I have been having a MULTITUDE of issues with FF this week, and if I can't figure out how to resolve them I'm going back to Brave. I've tried everything I can think to do to fix it, and nothing has worked. I've never seen any of these issues on any other browsers, this is 100% a firefox problem.

I'm on the latest build of FF on Windows 10 and have the following plugins:

  • Bitwarden
  • UBlockOrigin
  • Simple Login
  • Multi-account Containers
  • ProtonVPN
  • Old Reddit Redirect
  • RES
  • Enhancer for Youtube

The issues I'm having:

  1. Occasionally FF just hangs, won't respond to inputs, and the only way to recover it is to kill the process via control panel. When FF crashes like this I NEVER see the crash reporter, it's like FF thinks nothing happened and everything is fine.
  2. Sometimes my tabs just don't work. Like, I'll open a tab, type something in to search it, and it just hangs. I had this problem for YEARS when FF was my daily browser before switching to brave 2 years back because it got too annoying. This issue is COMPLETELY RANDOM, and happens within 1 minute of making a new tab- sometimes it will happen when I first try to navigate anywhere inside the new tab, sometimes it happens after I'm in a website.
  3. Sometimes FF refuses to start. I'll turn the computer on, click FF, and nothing will happen- then I'll go into control panel, kill the FF process, and try again until it works- usually when I do this the browser crashes at least once when it starts.

I can't make any sense of why this browser is so unstable for me, but it is SIGNIFICANTLY worse than it was last time I abandoned FF. I actually have FEWER addons than I did when I used FF as my daily driver before. If I can't figure this out this time I'm just not going to look back.

I have tried:

  1. Safe mode. This seems to fix it for a bit, but eventually either tabs stop working or the browser crashes. I'm pretty confident this is NOT an issue with any of my plugins- I'm using either official FF ones (multi-account containers) or very reputable plugins from good sources.
  2. Turning on/off hardware acceleration. This has no impact whatsoever
  3. I have repeatedly deleted all cookies, history, and cache, and reset the startup cache.
  4. Clean install FF
  5. Refresh FF
  6. Last time I tried to fix FF before switching to Brave, I found that having the FF Profiler running AT ALL TIMES actually seemed to make things a little bit better- but the profiler never once turned up anything useful.

I'm at my wits end here. I really want to be able to move off of chromium but FF is so incredibly annoying to use in its current state that I simply can't do that until I find fixes to these issues. Has anyone here got any clue what else I can do to try to diagnose this?

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[–] ale3smm@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

give nighlty I try on my second old phone were Firefox was not usable is now working quite well (for the old hardware snapdragon 660 and 4 giga of ram )the only sad part is opening or focusing url bar (which still show home )is painfully laggy and slow

[–] dditty@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The only issue I have with Firefox is on mobile (Android) swiping left or right in Google Image search results is totally broken. It's almost impossible to swipe left or right through the image results

[–] ademir@lemmy.eco.br 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] dditty@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It works fine in DuckDuckGo. I actually just tried it again it in Firefox Nightly and it worked fine. I saw my Firefox Nightly was updated this morning, here's hoping that was a bug they patched?

[–] ademir@lemmy.eco.br 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe yeah!

[–] narusite@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago

Try to install another version (for instance the [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/#nightly](nightly one)), with a new profile.

Then add your plugins one by one.

[–] gullible@kbin.social -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I once uninstalled a program that took a library that Firefox was using with it and had similar results. Drove me goddamn mad trying to figure it out. If it’s anything like that, I recommend just going back to chrome, or trying Firefox in a VM to pick it apart if you’re feeling incredibly motivated. Took me days to diagnose and a minute to download the fix.

[–] Landrin201@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wouldn't that be fixed by a fresh install though? I haven't uninstalled anything in the last few days...

[–] gullible@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

By god do I wish it had. Reinstalling didn’t bring back the library that my fan temp monitor murder suicided. I had to dissect friggin everything. Eventually it said that “‘insert name here’ stopped working” and I simply redownloaded it from Microsoft. It was strictly extreme obstinance that let me find the answer.

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