FireFox / screen freezes when visiting some sites

When attempting to visit some sites, FireFox appears to hang for around 30 - 40 seconds; the screen is basically locked and the mouse becomes inoperative. There almost always seems to be an audible cue, as the computer gives a short 'beep' at or near the start of the download - a sound that now fills me with apprehension in anticipation of the delay.

When visiting the same sites using Explorer or Chrome everything seems to work smoothly with no problems or delays at all.

A typical 'difficult' site would the jsfiddle site. Once 'loaded' the mouse returns and, as long as the browser is not closed, then further access is perfectly fine.

This sample page, http://jsfiddle.net/Xh3B2/ , took almost a minute on FireFox but was virtually instantaneous on the other browsers.


This odd behaviour has been a regular occurrence over the last several versions of FireFox.

Any ideas?

 

Hi Alan,

Your sample page opens quickly for me, with no audible tone, in FF 20.0.1, Pale Moon (64-bit FF), 64-bit IE 9.0.8112.16421, and Chrome 26.0.1410.64 m. Have you tried opening it in FF Safe Mode?

 

Interesting.
Close down FireFox, which automatically clears the cache. (I assume because that is he setting in Options)
Start in Safe Mode - all is fine.
Close down FireFox, again automatically clearing the cache.
Start FireFox as normal. All is fine!

Now, why on earth can that happen? Every time over the past several days whenever I have entered that site for the first time there has been the hang up. Even closing and reopening the browser and it happened.
Today - no obvious problem.

How very odd.

 

Gremlins at work in your system, perhaps.

I have my cache set at 0. I've been using FF since it was known as Phoenix, and I've never found that using a cache made any substantial difference in the browser's performance.

 

Not sure the cache is an issue to be honest. There are reports that Flash can be a problem but there is no way of knowing if there is one on an incoming site; certainly jfiddle doesn't, of course.

 

If you think that Flash may be an issue, here are a couple of FF extensions which will allow you to toggle it off and on.

The one I use is PrefBar. It has a great number of features, but I use only a few. Those include quickly increasing or decreasing font sizes on a webpage, toggling background colors off and on for those webpages that use background colors which make the text virtually unreadable, and toggling Flash off and on.

The other is Flash OnOff, which I haven't tried. There's a similar one for IE called Toggle Flash.

 

t may be premature to say the issue has been resolved, but it seems that the most likely culprit is the Adblock plugin.

Sites which had 'hung' for a time seem to load quite normally once that plugin is disabled.

Not sure whether to re-enable Adblock or not at the moment. Perhaps I'll monitor the issue for a few days and see if there are any 'hangups' without Adblock running.


Thanks for your earlier input.