I’ve been using FireFox for a few years, but in the last few months I’ve noticed it getting slower and slower. Opening a new tab often takes several seconds, navigating around and loading pages is also slow, and there are often sub-second hangups while typing in textareas and such. After re-visiting CyberNotes: Firefox Extensions cause Memory Leaks and Crashes, I have disabled Google Browser Sync again - that had caused problems in the past.
Of course, saying that “FireFox has still become too slow” is mostly a perception issue. Apps don’t get slower over time; usually it’s that we’re trying to do more with them - and that is exactly the case with FireFox (or whatever browser). Whereas it used to be just that, a browser, now it’s email, word processing, calendar, task list, maps, news, and whatever else - usually all open at once in multiple tabs, plus various add-ons and GreaseMonkey scripts. So on one hand it’s no surprise that the whole thing appears slower - although you’d think 3Gb of RAM would mitigate that to a large degree. Makes me wonder if FireFox can be configured to use more memory…



January 12th, 2008 at 8:25 am
Hi Dwell,
You are describing the problem as exactly what I’m having with FireFox. I don’t really know what’s going on too. Now switching tabs not only slow, but it’s freezing for few seconds. Sometimes it freeze for over 10s and cause me frustrating.
I’m suspecting the FireBug and Alexa plugins. I am going to disable them now to see what happen next.
Regards,
Binh
January 18th, 2008 at 6:54 am
I’ve had similar problems especially when typing. I sometimes type a sentence and have to wait a good 10 seconds for it to appear.
This often happens when I leave firefox open when I go into hibernate mode or leave firefox on for long periods of time.
Usually, deleting the cache and restarting firefox and getting rid of unnecessary plugins does the trick