Thursday 28 December, 2006

Firefox slow to react: can anyone help?

Filed under: Tech. stuff

Let me describe my symptoms, and hopefully a 21st century doctor out there can diagnose the problem.

I think the behaviour is limited to Firefox. In short, it has recently become very slow to react to keystrokes and mouse clicks.

If I click a field in my blog's rich-text editor and start typing, the cursor doesn't appear, nor do the words that I type appear in the box. On occasions, it ignores the preceding mouse-click, and when it eventually wakes up it throws the words into the box lucky enough to have previously been the focus of both my attention and my cursor. Sometimes, it obeys the mouse-click but misses the first few keystrokes. Other times still, when it eventually kicks in, it picks up all previous actions.

If I click in the search bar or address bar, I get a similar lag, the words appearing a number of seconds after I have typed them. (As an example of the delay I'm talking about, after I'd typed the word "after" in the previous sentence, I had already typed the words "I have typed them" before they started appearing letter by letter.)

If I CTRL+TAB between tabs, it's similarly slow. And if I have an application open in the foreground and ALT-TAB back to Firefox, it takes a few seconds to appear.

I was recently upgraded (without being given a choice) to Firefox 2.0.0.1, and the only other change I can think might have made a difference is my virginal use of the newly installed IE7 (again installed without my active consent) recently.

It's killing me. Can anyone help?


Posted by dan at 7:51am | Permalink | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)
Comments

I think I've solved the problem. I'd not re-started my browser for a number of days, choosing to hibernate my machine instead.

Re-starting the browser appears to have sorted it out.

Yippee!!

Posted by Dan 8:42am, Thursday 28 December 2006

Yes, I too notice this and it is fixed on a restart. I think it's to do with the old Adblock extension. Are you using that or Adblock Plus?

Check out the memory usage, it seems to grow and never drop, rather annoying but as you say, a quick exit/restart works. You don't have to reboot, BTW - just exit FF and restart it.

Posted by Rob 7:49pm, Saturday 30 December 2006

I'm using ABP. No re-boot necessary, just a restart of the app.

Small price to pay; it's a lovely piece of software...

Posted by Dan 9:09pm, Saturday 30 December 2006
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