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Why is Firefox 6 so SLOW?

Punster61
Punster61
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What gives? Ever since "updating" to FF 6, EVERYTHING is extremely slow. Gmail takes up to 3 minutes to load (after numerous clicks on "Reload tabs". Other sites just come up with a blank page, or just never finish loading. The green "busy" symbol will sit and spin forever, even after a page has apparently loaded. On some pages the photo placeholders never load the thumbnails, just empty boxes; sometimes fixed with "reload tabs" from the drop-down, sometimes not. Never had this problem in the past. Machine is an SYX Systemax, ASUS board, 12 G of RAM, Win7 64-bit, dual Radeon video cards, Crossfire enabled, High-speed wireless connection. Any help greatly appreciated before I go back to 5.0. Thanks in advance.

What gives? Ever since "updating" to FF 6, EVERYTHING is extremely slow. Gmail takes up to 3 minutes to load (after numerous clicks on "Reload tabs". Other sites just come up with a blank page, or just never finish loading. The green "busy" symbol will sit and spin forever, even after a page has apparently loaded. On some pages the photo placeholders never load the thumbnails, just empty boxes; sometimes fixed with "reload tabs" from the drop-down, sometimes not. Never had this problem in the past. Machine is an SYX Systemax, ASUS board, 12 G of RAM, Win7 64-bit, dual Radeon video cards, Crossfire enabled, High-speed wireless connection. Any help greatly appreciated before I go back to 5.0. Thanks in advance.

All Replies (5)

DarkredD14
DarkredD14
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So I believe I had this issue as well because YouTube videos and websites were loading extremely slow after the update. I did some digging and found some old tweaks that might help you out they seemed to have helped me: http://maketecheasier.com/28-coolest-firefox-aboutconfig-tricks/2008/08/21 now I only LOOSLEY followed step 13 especially on network.http.max-connections because Firefox 6's default seems to be extremely high which maybe a good thing however I do not know and I am assuming it is part of what is causing the issue. So to test it I have set it down to 96 I am going to run that for a couple of days and set it back up to the default value later however I have turned on the pipeline values and set them to true and that really has seemed to help speed up the connection but I left network.http.pipelining.maxrequests on the default value of 4.

chicher
chicher
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mozilla, ANSWER THIS QUESTION

agilson
agilson
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I was able to substantially increase my FireFox 6.0 speed by disabling hardware acceleration. Go to: Tools -> Options -> Advanced, and uncheck "use hardware acceleration when available."

Hope that helps.

agilson
agilson
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After posting the above, my Firefox was a lot better, but still not perfect. I spent an hour yesterday and re-installed Firefox.

  • backed up all my bookmarks and then all of my saved passwords
  • uninstalled Firefox using the add/remove/uninstall programs
  • removed all my personal information when it asked during the uninstall
  • rebooted once uninstalled
  • ran Advanced Systems Care and cleaned my machine / registry
  • did a search for "Mozilla" on my hard drive and deleted most references (I only use Firefox and not Thunderbird or anything else, so this was easy to do)
  • rebooted again
  • downloaded the full 6.0.2 install of Firefox
  • reinstalled my common plugins, NoScript, etc.
  • reinstalled, re-imported all my passwords and bookmarks, and did NOT disable "use hardware acceleration when available" that I wrote about above. I'd say that my Firefox is back to the way I remember it being under versions 4/5.

Modified by agilson

mnguardian01
mnguardian01
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I got the thing to zip right along. Here is what I did: First followed the advice from above: Go to: Tools -> Options -> Advanced, and uncheck "use hardware acceleration when available Secondly, i thought Firefox added a bunch a crap I don't use so I went to add-ons and erased and or removed everything I didn't add myself. Closed Firefox - DO NOT RESTART! Shut the machine off, waited for a couple of minutes fired her back up and Firefox 6 runs just as fast as my old version.