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Firefox is slow. Often get the beachball. Have cleared history, caches, checked hard drive and reinstalled Firefox, with no change. What can I do?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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Running on Mac 10.12.6. Not having a problem with any other application, including Safari.

Running on Mac 10.12.6. Not having a problem with any other application, including Safari.

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hi chaydgc, can you try to replicate this behaviour when you launch firefox in safe mode once? if not, maybe an addon is interfering here...

Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems

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You can try to modify multi-process settings to see if this has effect.

  • set dom.ipc.processCount to 1 if it is currently set to a higher value (4)
  • disable multi-process windows in Firefox

You can disable multi-process windows in Firefox by setting these prefs to false on the about:config page.

  • browser.tabs.remote.autostart = false
  • browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2 = false

You can open the about:config page via the location/address bar. You can accept the warning and click "I accept the risk!" to continue.


You can create a new profile to test if your current profile is causing the problem.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer files from a previously used profile to the new profile, but be cautious not to copy corrupted files to avoid carrying over problems.