Firefox lagging...

Recently Firefox (v3.6.13 on OS X Tiger 10. 4.11) is lagging when I'm typing an email in Hotmail, using the scroll bar and generally when using Firefox. The coloured spinning wheel also shows briefly at the same time as the lag occurs, which lasts for around a second each time.

The issue seems to get worse the longer Firefox is open (this might be my imagination). The lag happens no matter how many tabs I have open.

When quitting Firefox, I am also sometimes getting the spinning wheel, before the application freezes rather than quits and I see the message 'application not responding'... a force quit is required.

I have AdBlockPlus, Keeptube's video downloader and the Firefox PDF viewer add-ons installed.

Is this lagging a known issue? Is there something I can do to remedy the problem?

I thought it might be my mouse, or the surface the mouse is moving on but Safari works without any of the above mentioned problems.

Thanks.

Are you quitting Firefox completely - and regularly?? Firefox is slow, sluggish and seems to have a memory leak. Not sure what HW you're using - but my wife has a MacBook and she was always complaining about that as well. Since I've switched to Mac over the past few weeks - I've learned quite a few things - including the fact that Firefox is much slower than Safari and Chrome, and ties up too much memory. As a result - I have no plans to put it on my MBP if I can get away with it. (There may be one reason I end up having to use it...but we'll see)

I'd also use a flash blocker with Firefox if you're married to that browser to improve performance.

Firefox does generally seem to be much slower on the Mac (for whatever reason). Personally, I see better UI responsiveness running it in a Linux or Windows VM.

You're going to be running out of options when it comes to browsers if you decide to give another one a try. Chrome and Opera are Intel only and I'm not sure what versions of Safari you can run on Tiger (I know v5 requires at least Leopard).

Have you tried reinstalling it? I know it seems like a simple solution but it's a start.

Thanks for your replies. I disabled each of the extensions one at a time before using FF as I usually do for a while. Removing the FF PDF viewer add-on seems to have stopped the lagging and spinning wheel... maybe it was corrupt? Anyway, FF seems a little faster overall as well (although not as fast as Safari).

pod said:

Removing the FF PDF viewer add-on seems to have stopped the lagging and spinning wheel...

Click to expand...

I was going to say try removing your extensions one at a time to see if one of them was affecting Firefox's performance. Also part of your problem is that you can only use a much older version of Firefox.

The recent Firefox version I've noticed is about as fast as Chrome and Safari for me. Actually the latest version of Safari has gotten slower for me for some reason. It's been like that ever since the upgrade to version 5.

Anyway back on topic I'm not a huge fan of add-on extensions on any browsers. Many of them are coded well but some are poorly coded that they cause problems in the browser. If you have a lot of add-on extensions installed it becomes a headache to figure out which one is causing the problem.

EndlessMac said:

I was going to say try removing your extensions one at a time to see if one of them was affecting Firefox's performance. Also part of your problem is that you can only use a much older version of Firefox.

Click to expand...

Not quite . The OP noted that he was using 3.6.13, the most current stable version of FF. In fact, Mozilla is pretty good at ensuring that the browser supports older versions of OSes (4.0 for instance will still support Windows XP) while not allowing it to affect the features included. This may be why the development process seems so slow though - Firefox 3.6 was released January 2010.

I now only have two extensions/add-ons running. The only reason I'm staying with Firefox is AdBlockPlus as I'm now used to not having ads cluttering up my pages. I don't think there is a version available for OS X Tiger and therefore Safari (if I am wrong, please point me in the right direction!). Having used both browsers for the last couple of hours, Safari is definitely faster...

vansmith said:

Not quite . The OP noted that he was using 3.6.13, the most current stable version of FF. In fact, Mozilla is pretty good at ensuring that the browser supports older versions of OSes (4.0 for instance will still support Windows XP) while not allowing it to affect the features included. This may be why the development process seems so slow though - Firefox 3.6 was released January 2010.

Click to expand...

I guess I missed that comment. There was a time when Tiger didn't support the lastest version of Firefox. I remember not being able to use the lastest version of Firefox on an old Tiger machine awhile back.

They must have changed that now but then again it's been a very long time since I've used Tiger. Thanks for catching my mistake.

Hmm, I'm surprised that they removed support and then re-added it. I guess you do learn something new everyday. Any idea what version that was?

Looks like 3.6 will be the last though - 4.0 will be dropping Tiger support (see here). That's a shame given that XP will still be supported. In fact, Mozilla is making a big deal of that in light of the fact that IE9 won't support XP.

vansmith said:

Hmm, I'm surprised that they removed support and then re-added it. Any idea what version that was?

Click to expand...

I don't remember what version it was because this was many years ago. I've been using Firefox for many years now so it's hard to remember.

If I remember correctly they branched Firefox and left the older version still available for download. I just remember not being able to have the latest version of Firefox on one of my Macs running Tiger at the time.

I have since upgraded that Mac to Leopard so I didn't realize the latest Firefox supported Tiger.

Interesting. Well, according to the OP and the Firefox system requirements, 10.4 is indeed supported. It's also still supported on the PowerPC which is nice to see for those still running PPC Macs.

What's interesting is if you go to the Firefox 4 beta 11 release notes page (most recent beta), it still links back to the 3.6 system requirements. I wonder if this is because the system requirements are the same or they just haven't updated the page yet (since it is of course not a stable release). I get the feeling it's the latter and this would support what I've read (namely that 10.4 support is dropped) but who knows!

Firefox lagging

I FINALLY SOLVED MY HANGING, "STOPPED" LOADING AND FORCE QUIT PROBLEMS AFTER TRYING EVERYTHING SHORT OF ARCHIVE AND INSTALL.

I FINALLY SOLVED MY HANGING, "STOPPED" LOADING AND FORCE QUIT PROBLEMS AFTER TRYING EVERYTHING SHORT OF ARCHIVE AND INSTALL:
I HAD TO RESTART
"FORCED" TEN TIMES A DAY:

I UPDATED JAVA:

Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 9
About Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 9

also

JavaEmbeddingPlugin 0.9.7.5

I have a PPC G5 dual 2.0
OSX 10.5.8

Firefox 3.6.16