Firefox locks up when opening Bookmarks Menu
My firefox 7 locks up sometimes when I try to open my Bookmarks Menu. The menu appears without any contents and firefox becomes unresponsive for about 30 seconds (time varies) then the bookmarks will appear and firefox will become usable again. This first started happening under firefox 3.6 so I decided to switch to 7. Instead of upgrading, I backed up my bookmarks, completely uninstalled FF3.6, then did a fresh install of FF7 and restored my bookmarks. This did not fix the problem. I then tried disabling all my plugins, disabling all my extensions, and starting FF in safe mode. All of this had no effect.
It doesn't happen every time; more like every 5th or 6th time I open the Bookmarks Menu.
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You have already tried the basic troubleshooting ideas, and have even backed up your bookmarks.
I do not know if this is applicable but certainly worth a try:
- http://blog.bonardo.net/2011/09/30/is-your-firefor-freezing-at-regular-intervals
the underlying problem concerned the database firefox uses for history and bookmarks
The above blog includes a workaround with instructions. Also note the problem mentioned is now solved in firefox 8 (Soon to be released, and also available on the beta channel http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/ )
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For all I know this could be a common but possibly unreported problem with firefox. I am wondering, given that you have backups of your bookmarks, have you tried firefox with different sizes of libraries, is it only very large ones that cause a problem? (if so any estimates of sizes). Presumably if you run firefox with its default library you do not see any problem ?
If you are able to reliably reproduce the problem it could be worth filing a bug to see if Firefox developers are able to investigate.
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You have already tried the basic troubleshooting ideas, and have even backed up your bookmarks.
I do not know if this is applicable but certainly worth a try:
- http://blog.bonardo.net/2011/09/30/is-your-firefor-freezing-at-regular-intervals
the underlying problem concerned the database firefox uses for history and bookmarks
The above blog includes a workaround with instructions. Also note the problem mentioned is now solved in firefox 8 (Soon to be released, and also available on the beta channel http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/ )
-------
For all I know this could be a common but possibly unreported problem with firefox. I am wondering, given that you have backups of your bookmarks, have you tried firefox with different sizes of libraries, is it only very large ones that cause a problem? (if so any estimates of sizes). Presumably if you run firefox with its default library you do not see any problem ?
If you are able to reliably reproduce the problem it could be worth filing a bug to see if Firefox developers are able to investigate.
That first thing wasn't the issue, as upgrading to FF8 Beta did not fix it. However, as you mentioned the library, I tried clearing my browsing/download history and cookies (and nothing else), and suddenly the problem went away. I guess several years of stored history makes FF barf. The counter-intuitive part of all this is that when I first upgraded to FF7, I "completely" uninstalled FF 3.6 and instructed it to NOT keep anything at every turn, so I expected the install of FF7 to be as if FF was never on my machine at all. Apparently it still keeps that junk somewhere that was causing those massive stability issues. But a manual clear took care of it.
Glad you sorted it out.
The History and the Bookmarks are kept in the same database file places.sqlite
Problems with maintaining and using that database are one of the reasons for some of the recent hangs that users have been reporting. Clean re-installs are possible, but by default users profile information is always retained, and even the program files are not all cleared out.
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