Firefox 3.6 is unbelievably slow

Hello chaps

lets get right to it - for the last month or so, firefox has been horrific. the main problem i see is the memory hogging and general lagtastic browsing. this extends to opening new tabs, clicking on faves, and generally any kind of browsing. e.g. searching google will lag firefox for 4/6 seconds before it jerks back into life and loads. it isnt an internet problem since nothing else that uses the net experiences problems, and speed tests run fine. ive run shiretoko, the 64bit version of firefox, and it runs perfectly. if it had flash support (64 bit flash anytime soon adobe) it would be my primary.

also looking to just go to a new browser, chrome/opera?

thoughts n ideas chaps, go!
thanks in advance

Hi Faun, are you running the 3.5.8 version or the 3.6 version of Firefox? The reason I ask is, the 3.6 version does hang at times, and I've stripped all of my add ons except Adblock Plus & IE Tab. It helped, but didn't eliminate the problem. I may go back to the 3.5 8 version myself. I have no problems with it, but it's not on a Windows OS.

Hi faun

I'm using IE and if I was to switch, I think I would try Google Chrome.
Wish I could help with the Firefox issue but I've not used it much.

bugger
i knew i missed something out. im on 3.6
and the hang isnt "at times" for me, its more or less constant. ive done the usual testing, stripping away each addon etc, dosent make a difference. altho on a related note, flashblock keeps disabling itself, apparently saying it isnt compatible with 3.6. searching for updates rectifies this problem, until it decides to become uncomp. again.

hm, rolling back might be difficult?

I switched from IE to Firefox when 2.0 came out, and up until 3.5.x, I never looked back. As of 3.5, the performance has been going rapidly downhill. I switched to Chrome and have been very happy with it so far.

As for 64-bit browsing, it (and Flash, too) works just fine on Linux, but what kind of web pages are you loading that you'd need the extra memory space for?

A lot of users of Firefox have had issues with it since 3.5.8. I switch between Chrome and FF now.

I have dabbled with Opera, but am waiting for more features.

The ONLY thing I don't like about Chrome is the fact that the Bookmarks or Favorites section is hidden all the time and I have to click it to go to another site. Plus it's on the right of the browser window instead of the left. Which is where I prefer it to be.

I don't get what you mean.

nothing, its just a memory leak. and if its lagging on my HOMEPAGE (google) then i think theres a deeper problem.


as to the other posts about 3.5 n onwards sucking, i agree. they managed to tweak "fastest browser ever" so much they ended up nerfing it. good job mozilla.

ill get chrome for now, ive never touched it, so it should be an experience.

I've dabbled with Opera a little, too. But after a year of using Firefox, it's hard to switch. Safari isn't bad, but it takes a lot of space, as do all of Apple's products. But what I don't understand is this. Firefox 3.5.8 runs perfectly fine on Mint 8 x64 and Ubuntu 9.10 x64. Why does it screw up on Windows? It's the same browser, with the exception that under "Help", you can't check for updates, and there's a few add ons that you can't get.

Delete the contents of C:\Windows\Prefetch. It's completely safe.