What's ailing my Firefox?

I love Firefox but the past week it's been killing me.  It's a strange situation and searching on the web hasn't turned up anything pertinent so I'm going to see if anybody else is experiencing this.  Firefox runs fine but sometimes in the middle of doing something the status bar will say Stopped and once that happens all I can do is close the program.  The page displayed when this happens looks fine and all links are clickable like they're supposed to be but when I click them nothing happens.  It opens a new tab like it's supposed to but it just sits there saying "Loading" on the tab.  The status bar says Stopped and again, nothing will happen until I close the program.  I can reopen it and it will work fine for a while but this situation is happening more frequently as time goes on.  It never happened at all until this past week and I"m wondering if an update was made that introduced this problem.  Anybody seeing this happen with Firefox?

Comments

[Igor Savic]

Something similar is happening to me to, browser is "working" but when I try to click a tab it doesn't get focus, links are click able but when the new tab is opened I can not navigate to it :)

Solution: restart Firefox :) it works perfectly after that until it get stuck again :)

There is something wrong with this release of FF

[matias]

yes. right now. and several times before.
but I found that if you only close a window, leaving other working, and reopen. it just work fine. you don't need to shutdown all the firefox instances. weird.

[Mike Cane]

Listen, Firefix has been all scrood since before this last update:

http://tinyurl.com/2b2pmw

It freezes on me at least 2x a day like that. I have to kill its process. Sometimes I have to reboot totally. This is pain!!

Anyone else have that too?

[Scott_H]

I haven't experienced that specific problem, but I have noticed an increase in this situation: I'll be doing something in Firefox and it won't respond (It'll say "not responding" at the top of the window and I'll see the spinning ball next to the mouse). After some seconds, it'll start responding and working normally. It does this maybe 3 or 4 times a day.

I thought maybe this was JK's "Vista thrashing" issue, but it only seems to happen with Firefox. I am a *heavy* user of tabs (usually 20-50 open at any given time) and Google Reader is almost always open, but I don't do anything differently now than I ever did and this is a recent issue.

Also, recently Flash videos stopped working. I get a message that says I need to install the Flash Player -- even though it was already installed and working just fine until it suddenly stopped working.

I have Firefox 2.0.0.6, btw.

[Rune Solberg]

I run MacOSX and have been wondering whats been happening with Firefox the last week. Ive also experienced problems the last week with hangups and other programs just shutting down while I browse the web.

[TheDot]

I've been having the same problem, but on the Mac OSX version only.
For some reason my Windows version seems to running fine with the same load, but my OSX version exhibits the strange behavior you referred to.

[T Man]

I had some similar problems on Vista, and uninstalling Java and reinstalling seemed to do the trick.

[gasusan]

Check problematic extensions
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

or try diagnostic steps

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_-_Firefox

If all else fails uninstall and reinstall

(I am still working on diagnosing my issues with firefox (2.0.0.6 on In XP)

[Jose]

Same here. I have to start again Firefox three times a day on average (running MacOSX)

[snave]

I have had this problem since the WiFi bug in the latest MAC OS X updates. Try on WiFi and on network cable to see if it is the WiFi problem again. Also try turning the Airport off on your mac and then turning it back on leave for about 5-10 secs and then refresh Firefox. This seems to work for me.

[cr0ft]

I realize this isn't constructive as to fixing the actual problem, but it's a great solution IMHO - hit www.opera.com and grab that instead... (just take an hour or so to customize it, move things around in the interface etc until it becomes as you like it.)

Fast, rock solid, just plain usable.

We now return you to the regular Firefox topic...

[Tran]

^^^ What he said.

[Mike Cane]

Thanks for that Fox Diagnostics link! I'll set aside some time this week to go through that.

I'm running it on XP, btw. None of their problem extensions are ones I have.

[gasusan]

mike...no problem extensions for me either..

i did have wifi issues last week (lightening blew out my dsl modem and router)...and i had to redo my home wireless ("Mom" was not a fun person to be around with internet access). I feel like i am becoming an expert at diagnosing issues lately...

Actually, I feel better knowing others are having issues.... but still not enough to chase me over to IE....lol

[cr0ft]

The fact that the browser can be extended with addons is its strength and its greatest weakness... the main Firefox may be really well coded, but anybody can whack together an addon that will then wreak havoc at will.

[GoodThings2Life]

I'm betting on corrupted profile or bad extension, so I agree with running the above mentioned diagnostic tools.

[bluespapa]

I haven't paid attention to freezing, which means either it's been doing it all along to me, or it really hasn't (I'm guessing the latter), but my goodness whenever it seems to start chewing up my processor activity, it doesn't stop unless I close out and restart (quickest way is with the task manager and hit restore session when it comes up). Might could be an extension, as I run quite a few (damn I love those), but I've been curious if I'd see that with the others.

[MiniMage]

This is a problem I had lots before version 2. I haven't seen it in a long time.

[Seth]

Im having the same problem. Firefox will be running, then the status bar will say Stopped, and then Im screwed. I wont notice at first, and will have clicked it a few more times. This locks it up even more, then I try to go task manager and end the process, but that doesnt really do anything. it will say its ending it, but firefox will still be on the list. i will finally have to restart. Im a few months behind this blog, but has anyone found a solution yet. This just started happening in the last month or so.

[milouchien]

Got exactly the same problem as seth. Running OSX 10.5 fully updated. Have had problem for two downloads of firefox which is also at the latest version:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092414 Firefox/3.0.3

I actually think it's worse thatn the previous issues because it seems to require a restart to get going again. The powerbook gets pretty hot and noisy too while trying to do the job...