How to diagnose Firefox freezes

Question

How can I find what is causing Firefox to periodically freeze?

Answer 1

The most common reason for Firefox 'freezing' for a short amount of time is an extension compatibility problem.

The first thing I'd suggest is disabling all your current extensions and perhaps even your plug-ins. Then see what happens. If you find everything works, just re-enable your extensions/plug-ins one by one and test.

Answer 2

Are there any sites that you notice are up when it freezes?

Try running the NoScript plugin which may stop Firefox from freezing.

Answer 3

By freezes you may be referring to flash video freezing for a second or so. That's a known Firefox bug relating to how it periodically saves the list of open tabs.

Answer 4

Firefox without extensions should be stable. Disable all extensions to see if this is a problem of the extensions or interaction with your system or programs.

To disable all extensions, you may fun Firefox with --profilemanager parameters.

If this helps for the freezes, enable the plugins one by one, and see which one causes the problems (restarting each time).

Answer 5

Maybe your resources are depleted.

Possible solution:

• Try an add-on called AFOM, a memory recovery tool for Windows Firefox.
• Try to install StatusBarEx to see how many resources are used. Normally Firefox won't use more than 200 MB of RAM.
• Use Windows Task Manager to check how much free RAM left. If less than 50 MB, consider upgrading RAM or close other unnecessary programs / services.

I hope it helps!

Answer 6

Firefox uses a lot of resources, and I would only recommend its usage to web developers for its great plugins and extensions. If you are not a web developer, use Chrome.

Answer 7

Periodically freeze? It sounds a little weird. Do you watch a lot of videos? Or visit sites with Java applets? Java applets cause it to freeze the most, especially if the applet is big enough to download.

Firefox keeps trying to run it, but it finds the applet hasn't been downloaded completely, hence it freezes. Once the download is over, the Java execution starts. On old machines Java is slow.

You haven't given any extra clues, so can't say anything specific.

And yeah, it can be also due to infinitely looping JavaScript code on some websites.

This usually happens when you visit a site made purely for Internet Explorer and try to mask as Internet Explorer using the UserAgentSwitcher addon; some JavaScript code also contain malware.