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Firefox 20 loads VERY slowly (several minutes). What to do?

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Firefox 20 loads very slowly. sometimes taking several minutes. When it does open, it's often very slow to load sites. Sometimes it hangs for seconds to minutes and I get the spinning beach ball of death. I downloaded another copy of FF20 and installed it. Same thing. I cleared cache and cookies with only a little improvement. Suggestions? Mac OS 10.6.8

Thanks.

Firefox 20 loads very slowly. sometimes taking several minutes. When it does open, it's often very slow to load sites. Sometimes it hangs for seconds to minutes and I get the spinning beach ball of death. I downloaded another copy of FF20 and installed it. Same thing. I cleared cache and cookies with only a little improvement. Suggestions? Mac OS 10.6.8 Thanks.

All Replies (6)

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Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from an existing profile to the new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.

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I had to hire a support professional to solve the problem on my system (Sony Viao running Windows 7 Ultimate). The problem occurred in Firefox 21 and 22, and caused Firefox to start very very slowly and then "not responding" to almost any action you would ask it to do.

The solution was to disable almost all but several essential plugins. I currently only have 3 enabled,

Java Deployment Toolkit Java Platform SE 7 U25 Silverlight Plugin

then there are a bunch of plugins the engineer disabled, and I am not sure what all of them do, nor am I sure precisely which one of them caused the problem.

There is an Adobe Acrobat plugin and about 20 others. I am trying to go through the dates they were installed to localize which one might have caused the problem, since my problems started around June 13th or so (unlucky day I guess) probably when I inadvertently installed some bad plugin.

But after checking the date, it is not clear if the date listed for plugins is the install date or date of last update, so I have no easy way to determine which, if any, of the plugins the engineer disabled was the culprit. But at least I can use Firefox again. This cost me a lot of time, money and aggravation. I hope it will not happen again, or that Firefox develops a better diagnostic tool to identify faulty plugins.

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I am using Windows XP. Have FF 22 recent upgrade from FF20. Had problem with 20 & now with 22. When I open FF for the first time each day it takes several minutes to open. I have done all the online suggestions; no plug-ins, no extensions are enable.. I did the FF reset. Still the same.

Again, this is only during first start up of FF each day, once it's been opened it's fast after that. I have McAfee AV software suite from AT&T. It is set for fast start as far as scanning files is concerned. Could the fact that I am using AT&T McAfee instead of FF version be an issue?

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First time I faced it when I installed Firefox 20.x. For these reason all of the plugins disabled by me. Then I unchecked hardware label acceleration. After that its not load speed up but works little bit fine for me. After a certain period later its infect entire PC. For these reason I format my net book and install fresh copy of OS windows 7, applications and utilities.

After fresh install of OS windows 7, I installed Firefox 22.x . Its goes fine but after installing Skype, its cause same kinds of problem. It's very much annoyed me. Fortunately my system image replaced by me from recovery images. and its working fine last two month. My assumption was Skype or it plugins was all root of devil. So I was afraid about Skype and decided not to install it.

but today I feeling same problem. Firefox 22.x take several minutes for first time load. I trying to solve it from Firefox forum. but nothing hopeful. I am not so panic but its much more time consuming for every body those are web application developer. For your kind acknowledgement I ensuring that no changes were made by me in Firefox settings before the problem occurred. How do I could over come this issue.

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It is possible that your security software (firewall, anti-virus) blocks or restricts Firefox or the plugin-container process without informing you, possibly after detecting changes (update) to the Firefox program.

Remove all rules for Firefox and the plugin-container from the permissions list in the firewall and let your firewall ask again for permission to get full unrestricted access to internet for Firefox and the plugin-container process and the updater process.

See:


Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.

See "Creating a profile":

If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from an existing profile to the new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.