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After upgrading to Firefox 7 getting massive connection issues when using 3 or so tabs, many pages slow to load, have to retry many times , makes firefox un-usable

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  • 281 have this problem
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  • Last reply by jatait

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Hey there, I have been using Firefox for a few years with out any troubles. Then I updated to 7 last night. And since then Firefox has been more or less un-useable. The issue happens when I have about 3 or 4 tabs open and browsing in each one. Firefox has trouble loading up a site and then it can not load any other site in the tabs. I am not talking about small sites, but gmail, msn, netflix, engadget, CNN, ect. This has NEVER happened before. I have tried to disable all addon and start in safe mode only to see the same thing happen. It even happened to this help page.

It almost as if when a site is slow to load something, it cause any new site not to load from that point on. The fix is to always go back to the offend tab. Stop it and all other tabs. Then try again.

I opened up IE 9 and tested the same URLS and sure enough they did not have this issue.

Any ideas?

Hey there, I have been using Firefox for a few years with out any troubles. Then I updated to 7 last night. And since then Firefox has been more or less un-useable. The issue happens when I have about 3 or 4 tabs open and browsing in each one. Firefox has trouble loading up a site and then it can not load any other site in the tabs. I am not talking about small sites, but gmail, msn, netflix, engadget, CNN, ect. This has NEVER happened before. I have tried to disable all addon and start in safe mode only to see the same thing happen. It even happened to this help page. It almost as if when a site is slow to load something, it cause any new site not to load from that point on. The fix is to always go back to the offend tab. Stop it and all other tabs. Then try again. I opened up IE 9 and tested the same URLS and sure enough they did not have this issue. Any ideas?

All Replies (20)

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Hey,

I am having a similar issue after upgrading from Firefox 6 to Firefox 7. If I try to open a bunch of links at the same time or try to open all the bookmarks in a folder as tabs I get stuck with partially loaded pages, "Connecting to..." or "Waiting for...". I don't get this issue with other browsers (Chrome 14, Internet Explorer 9) and if I deleted everything and reinstalled Firefox 6 there was no problem again.

For me the solution was the network.http.max-connections setting. Lowering this setting from it's default of 256 to 32 fixed the issue. If you haven't tried changing this maybe give it a go by typing about:config into your address bar, then click on the network.http.max-connections setting and changing the value to 32. If this doesn't work you can always go back into the config and change it back to whatever you had previously or reset it to default.

Good luck :)

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Also see -> Firefox can't load websites but other browsers can

Check and tell if its working.

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user "memzer" thanks, that fixed the problem.

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Add my thanks to memzer. I'd tried cache clearing umpteen times, to no avail.

One weird aspect, the stalled loads never seemed to occur until I tried browsing to netflix.com. Thereafter, nothing would load.

That article linked by "mha007" is interesting. If tweaking the network.http.max-connections setting hadn't already solved the problem, I would have tried DNS prefetching. If the max-connections tweak turns out to not be a fix, I'll try DNS frefetching.

I wonder how many people are dealing with this..

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I have the same issue. Also, I find that if I open Netflix in a tab, nothing else can happen, in any tab while Netflix loads, and loads and loads, forever. It never actually finishes whatever it's doing.

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Folks, I downgraded back to a version 6 version and was able to use that with out any trouble (never had that issue). Today I went and downloaded 7 again and son of a gun if its not working great. I have been using it for 5 hours and the issue has not resurfaced. I did NOT get a chance to try any of the tweaks here. I did notice that its version 7.0.1 of firefox..not sure if the .1 version was what I had the first time...

Thanks again for all your help!!! Jb

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I've reverted to 6.0.2 which you can still get here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/ and everything works fine again.

I'll wait until they sort it out before updating again

[Unofficial third-party link removed by moderator. Also note that Firefox 6 has published security vulnerabilities fixed in the most recent version.]

Modified by Chris Ilias

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This worked for me - at least so far. Do not know yet if it will also help the java script issue and the multiple tab issue ( When you are on a sight and click a link it automatically opens the link in a new tab, but when you click on that tab, it closes it - not opens it. Firefox 7.0 a disaster - please make 6.0 available again until you can sort out these problems - released too early!

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after doing all kinds of things to remedy this problem i tried a real simple thing and it solved the entire problem.

  just go to your fire fox  drop down box , cursor over History, now clear recent history. 
  I have it all selected to delete all my private data.   it cleared all the crap out and the problems solved 100% all good again.   apparently they do not allow for a very large cache of stuff in that file and it freaks the program out to have it full. 
  all good  now though.      Hope this helps.
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@ memzer. Thanks. It worked on ff 8.0 beta version too.

I had issues with a particular site with lotsa photos and videos. After setting that no. to 32, the site opens pretty fast now.

Why that particular no. 32 ? Will a lower no., like say 1, work better ?

Modified by amkeew

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Try it and check it :p

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And get screwed in that process ? No, thanks. I will stick with what is working for me now. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that. :)

Modified by amkeew

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You need to allow at least some connections. If 256 is too much and 32 (or 30 as that was used in Firefox 3 versions) is working for you then stay with it. A value of one is obviously way too low to the opposite side and you shouldn't try that.

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Thanks cor-el. What do those connection numbers mean ?

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That is the total number of connections that can be open at any time. There is another pref to set the maximum to one server (network.http.max-connections-per-server: 15).If there are too many connection open at a time and your connection can't handle that many then some can get lost and need to be requested another time.

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Thanks again cor-el.

Should I leave that max connections per server at 15 or change it for more speed ?

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No, don't change that maximum per server as if will annoy the Administrators because you use up bandwidth that prevents others from accessing the website and may get you banned.

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No, I was thinking about reducing that number, not increasing it.

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Yes, there is nothing against decreasing it if you want to check it out.
network.http.max-connections was 24 and network.http.max-connections-per-server was 8 in Firefox 2 versions and has been increased to 15 in Firefox 3.
I wouldn't go lower.

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