There appears to be a MAJOR issue (hang/memory leak) in "about:home", also known as the Firefox Start Page, in Firefox 26.0 on Windows!
There appears to be a MAJOR issue (hang/memory leak) in "about:home", also known as the Firefox Start Page, in Firefox 26.0, on Windows!
observed on: - Windows 7 x64 machine with 12GB RAM and high-performance CPU (core i7-920) - Virtual Machine guest running WinXP SP3 (in Oracle VirtualBox) on the same machine - Intel Atom D525 netbook with 4GB RAM, running Win7 x64
Neither of these machines are connected via Sync or anything like that. The Firefox instance on the VM is a fresh/clean install.
The problem: - 100% cpu usage for 10 seconds, memory usage (PF usage in XP) goes up to 1.7GB - if "about:home" is the Firefox Start Page, effectively it hangs the computer at Firefox startup for 10 seconds - if "about:home" is NOT the Firefox Start Page, startup is fine - BUT if I press the "home" button on the toolbar it loads "about:home" which causes the same issue again
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Sounds that there is an issue with one of the snippets that are loaded. I've seen more reports about such an issue.
You can set the browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl pref to an empty string on the about:config page to disable loading (new) snippets to see if that helps.
You can open the about:config page via the location bar
You need to delete the "storage\moz-safe-about+home" folder in the Firefox profile folder to remove already stored snippets.
You can use this button to go to the Firefox profile folder:
- Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
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Sounds that there is an issue with one of the snippets that are loaded. I've seen more reports about such an issue.
You can set the browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl pref to an empty string on the about:config page to disable loading (new) snippets to see if that helps.
You can open the about:config page via the location bar
You need to delete the "storage\moz-safe-about+home" folder in the Firefox profile folder to remove already stored snippets.
You can use this button to go to the Firefox profile folder:
- Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
Thank you cor-el! Your suggestion has solved the problem on my WinXP VM which I was using to test, and I will soon confirm that it has also solved the problem on my primary Win7 desktop.
To recap:
- I set "browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl" to an empty string
NEW VALUE: (blank)
- I deleted the folder \storage\persistent\moz-safe-about+home under the Profile directory
Actual folder name on WINDOWS XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<USERNAME>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<PROFILENAME>\storage\persistent\moz-safe-about+home
However I have a concern that the OLD VALUE of "browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl" will creep back in, in a future update! Can you communicate this issue to someone on the development team?
Related thread with more information and a different workaround, for anyone still seeing the problem:
- /questions/984193 Firefox hangs on the default Start Page
This issue has been fixed and the file has been removed from the server.
Note that you can reset the browser.aboutHomeSnippets.updateUrl in case you want to revert this and have the new snippets show up once again on the about:home page.