Anyone Has This Experience With Firefox 3?
By lexus54
@lexus54 (3572)
Singapore
September 15, 2008 9:56pm CST
I am an ardent user of Mozilla Firefox. It has been my preferred web browser for the past 4 years over IE and Netscape because of its wonderful features. I usually have relatively smooth surfing experience using Firefox, but in recent weeks after I upgraded to the latest version 3.0.1, surfing has not been that smooth for me.
I surf the internet for many hours each day. Several times a week, my Firefox browser will slow down, sometimes to a crawl. It is most evident when I try and type in some text (like now when I am composing this discussion) and the text will appear on the screen only after a delay of 1 or 2 seconds. I experience the same thing when I am doing some data entry in other internet applications or writing emails. This can be frustrating when you are trying to type fast on your keyboard and don't get to see what you type immediately. Usually when this phenomenon happens, I have several tabs on and accessing other sites as well, and all the browsing will slow down tremendously. To get rid of this performance "irritation", I close all my browser tabs, get out of Firefox, and immediately come back into Firefox again, and the performance issue will be gone. Surfing will be smooth again.
I don't remember ever experiencing this with earlier versions of Firefox.
Anyone else has a similar experience as mine with the latest Firefox? Is there anything I should set in Firefox to circumvent such a performance issue? I don't think it is my PC since I am running a Pentium 4 3.0MHz processor with sufficient memory and HDD space. Any advice anyone can give me will certainly be appreciated. 
5 people like this
16 responses
@migsmartinez (1293)
• Philippines
16 Sep 08
I've had the same problem. I think it's a memory leak bug in Firefox. When I was browsing and that happened to me, I opened up the task manager and to my surprise, Firefox was eating more than 300MB of RAM. I did the same thing you did, restart my browser. Next time it happens, check your task manager and see if your Firefox is eating up memory. If it is, you should contact the Firefox team and report the bug to them.
1 person likes this
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
300MB usage is pretty high, I reckon. You must be opening multiple windows as well as having many add-ons. I guess that's ok if you are aware not to overtax your computer and still get reasonable performance in your browser application and other Windows-based apps you are running.
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
Hi martinez, it's interesting what you just shared. I've never thought of the issue from a memory leak angle. 300MB is significant. Usually I think Firefox eats up less than 100MB of RAM. Can you elaborate further how having memory leak and Firefox eating so much memory make it sluggish? Is it a case of contention for whatever existing memory your PC has? And if all the processes running at that time don't take up 100% of available memory, will that still make Firefox sluggish? Just throwing up some thoughts...not sure if you can enlighten further. But I'll take your cue, and check the memory usage for the Firefox process the next time it happens and do some comparison. Right now, my Firefox is behaving normally, and I notice the Task Manager shows Firefox consuming around 90MB RAM, plus or minus a few MBs.
@migsmartinez (1293)
• Philippines
16 Sep 08
I only have 512MB of RAM on my laptop and when I run Firefox and it reaches around 300MB of RAM usage, the system slows down. Since my RAM is limited and I have other programs running at the same time, the laptop chokes in a a way. It can't really handle that much load because it's only 512MB.
@prajnith (941)
• India
16 Sep 08
i experience problem Fire fox 3 when i use in my pentium 2 system, usually my harddisk keeps on reading after i load firefox 3 never happened in firefox 2.
in my pentium 4 ,sometimes i notice that harddisk reads continuously even though no other application is running, i doubted its some kinda virus running in my system.
but this happens only when fire fox 3 is open.
in your case may be your system is infected by virus. and whats the amount of ram you have ,if its 512 Mb its ok but less than that firefox3 might cause problem.
and just check if any firefox update is running in background.
1 person likes this
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
Hi there, thanks for dropping by. My PC has 768MB RAM, so that's more than enough to run a common browser like Firefox. No there is no other Firefox update running in the background. The strange thing is my Firefox sometimes runs well the whole day. If I mostly do browsing without having to do a lot of keyboard stuff, it usually runs quite efficiently. I guess for your case, pentium 2 doesn't work so efficiently now given that many of the software applications these days get more and more sophisticated with add-on features, and it is always good to run a more current system that is more powerful. The browsers may not be that resource-intensive, but many applications now are graphics intensive and demand higher resources to run efficiently.
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
Thanks for that suggestion. I'm usually very wary of keyloggers, as I also do internet banking on my PC. I ALWAYS use the onscreen keyboard to key in sensitive IDs and passwords. I just ran my anti-spyware program yesterday night, and I still get the sluggishness in Firefox just now (i.e. this morning), so it may be something else, I reckon.
@prajnith (941)
• India
16 Sep 08
ya you are right, i removed firefox 3 and installed firefox 2 in my Pentium 2 system, but i sometimes experience the problem even in my pentium 4.
try checking if your system has any spyware or keyloggers, and do you come across this problem in internet explorer. keyloggers usually note down all your key strokes so more you type the more it has to note down and send ..
you better try uninstalling firefox and reinstalling it again..
@royal52gens (5488)
• United States
16 Sep 08
I have not had that experience. Since upgrading to FF3, I have a few sites I am having trouble accessing. It keeps timing out and telling me the browser has quit trying to access the site I have asked it to go to. I have yet to figure out how to correct this situation.
1 person likes this
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
Thanks for sharing your experience. Unfortunately I can't offer any solution to your situation. But I guess a quick check to see if it is related to FF3 is to try accessing the problem sites via other browsers at the same time, and see if you also get a timeout. Could be the site's not available. Other members who read your post here may be able to offer their advice to you.
@ferdzNK (3211)
• Philippines
16 Sep 08
I'm using FF3 updated to 3.0.1 with lots of addon and except when my ISP speed is slow during peek hours only then can I noticed this sluggishness. Try to monitor the time it happen to you maybe its just the traffic a change of schedule maybe is needed or it is just temporary. Sometime when I experience sluggishness not only in FF but Office and other application, I do the system cleanup, I use CCleaner it clear all temporary file accumulated FF and also tidy up the registry. If your antivirus is updated always I don't think you are infected.
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
Ah, your message brings to mind the word "sluggish". I wanted to say my browser became sluggish instead of slowing to a crawl, but couldn't find the word at the time of composing. I agree ISP speed does play a significant part in internet performance. For me, I have a 3Mbps broadband link and I usually get good speed. I don't think I am affected by viruses because I do scan occasionally. I also apply CCleaner on alternate days, and it is a great program to use. I'll take your suggestion to monitor the times and traffic situation, and see if there is a co-relation to what I have experienced. Thanks for sharing your advice.
1 person likes this
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
I usually also have IE on running a traffic exchange application, and usually IE behaves quite well at the time when I am having the slowness in Firefox. So the issue may be browser related. But of course, I am running more things on Firefox with 4 or 5 tabs open, and only 1 application in IE so it is not exactly apple to apple comparison.
1 person likes this
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
Hi there, Vinay, I guess if you have powerful enough resources on your PC, and you don't open too many concurrent tabs in your FF3 to access too many sites or applications, you should not get any problem. For my configuration, if I open one or two less tabs, I should be ok also. I just have to be mindful of that. Thanks.
@Saiyan25 (86)
• Canada
17 Sep 08
I don't recall ever having this problem myself with the new firefox. Firefox 3 is meant to be a lot faster and memory efficient so if you haven't had problems with the old one, you shouldn't with the new. It's most likely the fact that you have so many things open at one time and there isn't enough memory for the computer to allocate to each tab so it goes slowly. You can try defragmenting your drive and you might get results out of that. If all fails, reformat, that might work. :D
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
17 Sep 08
Hi Saiyan, Mozilla did say that FF3 is faster and more memory efficient. Somehow I have been monitoring the memory usage, and noticed that when my Firefox consumes about 140MB or more memory, it starts to get sluggish. I checked all the processes running in the Windows Task Manager, and they come to around 500+ MB, and I have 768MB of main memory, so can't be insufficient memory. So not sure if things like increasing the memory to at least 1GB, or setting higher virtual memory/swap space will help here. I have about 8GB of free space. I'm not so keen to do a defrag or reformat, cos it's troublesome unless very necessary.
@positiveminded1977 (7072)
• India
16 Sep 08
Yes, I have experienced precisely the same thing and thought I was the only victim. I blamed it on my Internet connection. I am on dial up, and I thought it was because of my slow Internet connection, Firefox is behaving this way. I am really interested in knowing how the others have responded to this discussion.
Cheers and happy mylotting
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
I think generally if you have slow internet connection, whatever you do in browsing the internet will be slower, and not so smooth at times. How fast a page is shown to you not only depends on your ISP connection and download speed, but also on the source of that webpage. If you see the post before yours by drannhh, I have mentioned from my observation that the slowness seems to creep in when Firefox uses memory beyond a certain level. For my case, that seems to be around 110MB or 120MB. So it looks like if I control the memory usage to below that, I won't get this slowness. You may also want to monitor the memory usage if you get slowness and see if you can establish some pattern to your problem. Thanks for sharing, and I hope you will learn something useful here from all the discussions.
@underdogtoo (9579)
• Philippines
16 Sep 08
Thanks for the info. I keep getting notices to upgrade to Firefox 3 and I keep putting it off because it is said to render some plugins inoperable. Now I know I will not upgrade any time soon.
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
I guess plugins getting inoperable can't be helped if the application they were supposed to run under is upgraded. I supposed new plugins will be written, and you will just have to get rid of those that don't work anymore, find the latest ones available, download and install them. That's the nature of computer programs. You should examine the new features in Firefox3 and if they are useful to you, you should consider upgrading, then tackle the problem of inoperable plugins after that.
@illfavors (590)
• United States
17 Sep 08
That's odd, I am experiencing the delay in typing in text, but it has only been here on mylot. No other sites have caused this issue. I haven't had too many issues with Firefox 3 and I like it so far, but I do know that it has just been recently released so there might still be a few kinks that need to be worked on.
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
17 Sep 08
Yes, that's a little odd. Maybe when you are experiencing this slowness in typing, you can check if other apps that require you to do lots of typing like an email app running off your FF3 browser shows some slowness too in the typing of text. I also read some members' comments that there was some performance issue earlier in accessing myLot. Maybe that contributed to your situation. I read in the Mozilla website that Mozilla has made 15K improvements in this new FF3 release and the browser is also supposed to be faster. Sounds good and I will stick to FF3 and hope whatever kinks there are that may hinder performance will be taken care of over time. Thanks for your feedback.
@jesbellaine (4139)
• Philippines
3 Dec 08
Is the firefox 3 a beta software? Or it has already been released? I am using firefox right now and it is just an update. It is 2.0.0.18. I haven't tried the version 3 but will check on it when I get home. I think my brother updated our firefox browser lately. I'll check the browsing if it is cool or not. Cheers!
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
4 Dec 08
Thanks for dropping by. Firefox 3 has already been released. The last official version released is I think 3.0.4. Firefox 3.1 is now in beta. You can download a free copy of Firefox 3.0.4 for Windows from the Mozilla site here http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0.4&os=win&lang=en-US.
@banadux (630)
• United States
16 Sep 08
myLot probably isn't the best place to find answers for this. I would go over to the mozilla forums if you are continuing to have this problem. If you are having problems while typing things in it could be related to spell check, but I can't say that I've ever had that problem with mine. In any case go over to the mozilla forums or any technical forums that have a section for Firefox.
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
Thanks for the suggestion, banadux. Good advice. I normally go to several sources to get answers to PC-related problems. Over here, it is more to socialize, and if someone knowledgeable can offer good relevant advice through their sharing, that will be great.
@wiseshopping1 (679)
• China
17 Sep 08
i don't have the experience. I want to have a try if it's really good.
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
17 Sep 08
Hi there, Firefox is a really nice browser to use. You can download a free copy here http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/. You can also read about the features of Firefox and also improvements for the new version 3 at this site. Many people liking this browser can't be wrong. Over time, it is gaining a larger market share of the browser market and inching closer to Internet Explorer.
@ptrikha_2 (46917)
• India
19 Sep 08
Hi , I have been using Firefox 3 version since last 3 days . I have not faced any such problems . Yet ;I do have heard of people complaining about some Firefox 3 .
@hugosousa (37)
• Portugal
16 Sep 08
Hi lexus54.
It can be a problem with the addons that you have installed.
A simple test you can do is to disable all your addons and confirm if the problem persists.
If not, than you have a faulty addon or an addon incompatible with firefox 3.
If it does continue with that odd behaviour, you should uninstall and reinstall a fresh downloaded copy of firefox 3.
Best Regards,
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
Thanks for sharing, hugosousa. That's a very valid possibility. But I have very few add-ons in Firefox. I took a look earlier, and saw that 2 of the add-ons were incompatible with Firefox 3.0.1 so I have deleted them about 30 minutes ago. Some add-ons just take up memory and are useless, especially if they are not compatible. I'll see if my Firefox performs better now. Worse-case scenario, I'll just do a fresh install if things don't improve.
@hugosousa (37)
• Portugal
16 Sep 08
Try that.
Another thing I forgot to ask was about updates, do you have your firefox updated?
@drannhh (15219)
• United States
16 Sep 08
I had performance issues with Firefox 3 after first downloading it, and uninstalled and reloaded and had more of the same, but the third time was a charm and I haven't had any issues since. I waited a month or so after the second try before installing it again and I guess in that time the fixed the problems.
@lexus54 (3572)
• Singapore
16 Sep 08
Hi there drannhh, glad you had resolved your performance issue with FF3 previously and it is not bothering you now. Following what Martinez said in post 4 above, I have been monitoring the memory usage of Firefox in my PC the past hour, and I notice that when the memory used exceeds a certain range, the slowness or sluggishness will come in; when that happens, I just close one or two tabs, the memory usage drops below that threshold and the performance will no longer be an issue. So I reckon my problem with using Firefox is really memory-related. I will have to find out more about reducing memory usage for Firefox. Thanks for dropping by.
@luiscpatag (355)
• Philippines
16 Sep 08
i have no such experience with firefox3.. for me it's still the best over ie & safari..
occasionally i have browser loading problems but this is because we have slow internet connection.. (it goes for all my browsers) and it usually solved by stopping my downloading of movies via p2p..
i also make sure i don't have virus like trojans that clog the internet signals, or in some cases slow down your computer processor.. (for the internet speed problem, we have already applied for upgrade for our dsl provider)
