Firefox freeze-ups (Windows 7)

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Oleg Volk

For several days now, I am having Firefox freeze up for 20-30 seconds at a time every several minutes. Can’t figure out what’s causing it. Other programs appear unaffected during that time. Does anyone know if it’s caused by something common or obvious?

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13 Responses to Firefox freeze-ups (Windows 7)

  1. Steelheart says:
    April 10, 2013 at 10:31 pm

    All I can tell you is that I’m running Firefox on Windows 7 without any issues. This machine is recent, purchased in early Dec. if that makes any difference.

    Steelheart

    • Rufus says:
      April 11, 2013 at 4:12 pm

      I had this happen many time when going to various websites. The problem WAS something to do with fonts in Firefox. I solved the problem by changing an option in Firefox:
      goto…
      options,
      content,
      advanced,
      UNcheck the “allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above”.
      click OK.
      If it is a font problem, this MAY fix it. DID for me. Good luck.

  3. Dave says:
    April 11, 2013 at 12:20 am

    Just a guess, but if it’s happening regularly, it might have something to do with either Safebrowsing updates or SSL certificate revoking updates not working. Maybe a DNS resolution failure for an essential FireFox sub-service?

    You could try loading Wireshark, a free, open source network analyzer, to examine the traffic it sends and receives during those freeze-ups to give you a hint as to what, if any, network issue could be causing the problem.

    If this doesn’t make sense then never mind… 🙂

  4. Richard says:
    April 11, 2013 at 1:11 am

    Hey Oleg,

    Coincidentally, I work for Mozilla. I’d be happy to help figure this out (admittedly while dealing with a household move).

    Shoot me an email with your Firefox version and the output of about:support?

    Thanks.

  5. Dandapani says:
    April 11, 2013 at 5:21 am

    The solution to your FF problems is Chrome. 🙂

  6. anon says:
    April 11, 2013 at 7:47 am

    I had the exact same problems. It was Adobe Flash. I’d have to kill Flash to get FireFox to respond. I got tired of dealing with this issue and went to Chrome. Life is good now.

  7. SiGraybeard says:
    April 11, 2013 at 11:55 am

    FWIW I’ll echo Steelheart. I run FF at home on Win 7, with Adobe Flash, and no problems with FF freezing.

  8. Cory Brickner says:
    April 11, 2013 at 1:45 pm

    I’ve noticed that there is a memory leak with FF when using You Tube / Flash and keeping the browser open for a decent amount of time. It depends on how long you keep things open and how much you use Flash.

    If you open the Windows Task Manager and hit the Processes tab, you should be able to identify the culprit.

  9. Jack Spectre says:
    April 11, 2013 at 2:52 pm

    Oleg, I’m getting the same thing. I think Cory nailed the problem exactly…some sort of Flash memory leak. Hopefully Mozilla or Adobe will fix it soon…

  10. David Dyer-Bennet says:
    April 11, 2013 at 5:23 pm

    My Firefox on W7 does seem to leak memory, though not diastrously. I just closed it after half a day, and pre-close it had 400,000k of memory, but after closing and re-opening the exact same tabs it had 159,000k of memory.

    If it’s flash-related…I don’t watch that many videos, so it may happen much slower for me than for others.

    I do frequently leave it open for a week without it hanging or crashing. Sometimes I notice it getting sluggish, and if I can I will re-start it then, which does seem to help (again supporting the memory leak theory).

  11. Gewehr98 says:
    April 11, 2013 at 8:30 pm

    My Firefox was locking up under Windows 7 64-Bit Ultimate for quite some time – 0ne reason was a particular version of the Adobe Flash Player. The other was the Mozilla Plug-In Container executable, which was having fits until I could terminate it under Task Manager.

    It bugged me enough that I ditched 32-Bit Firefox, and installed 64-Bit Waterfox, instead. It has the same Mozilla look and feel, just optimized to run as a 64-Bit browser. No problems since then…

  12. Peter says:
    April 12, 2013 at 8:03 am

    I run Firefox with Windows 7 on a couple of different machines with no apparent problems. I do use NoScript, and have been amazed at the amount of crap sites try to run when you visit.

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