Firefox suddenly sluggish

In the past week, Firefox has become extremely slow. I finish typing a phrase before it appears on screen. Although pages appear fairly quickly, it takes quite a while before they finish loading so I have to wait much longer than usual to click links or scroll.

I'm using the latest edition of Firefox on a laptop (less than 1 year old) running XP. My Internet connection is DSL. I've run a virus scan, Spybot, CWShredder, and Ad-aware. Nothing found. According to Windows, I don't need to defrag my hard drive. IE7 currently runs much faster than Firefox. System Restore didn't work, either.

Does anyone have any ideas about what may be wrong?

 

To be more precise

.select Network tab.

 

I tried that and, unfortunately, it didn't help.

I increased the size of the cache, nudged the pipelining up by one, and disabled the five extensions I had. That improved the page loading time a lot, but there's still a l-o-n-g stutter before I can scroll or type.

 

My Firefox has never been a ball of fire, but it works quite well, after a long time to load. Long time to load has to do with extentions.
It is possible that you have some extention or software which is looking at your pages before allowing access.

 

Lee,

Are these the settings you're using for pipelining:

network.http.pipelining: true

network.http.proxy.pipelining: true

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: 30
(This value means the browser will make 30 requests at once.)

Have you added this setting in about:config:

Right click anywhere
Select: New | Integer
Type: nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Set the value to: 0 (zero)
(This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.)

There is also an extension, FasterFox, which is also a performance enhancer. I can't recommend the extension as I don't use it. Perhaps a member who is using it will join in to say whether or not it is worthy of installation.

 

More on your slugish Firefox:

Take a look at this Mozilla KB Article for more workarounds:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_hangs

AND

A list of problematic extensions:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

Extensions are the usual culprits, and that when you disabled yours, Fx did run faster...

 

I have Fasterfox, but did not find that it did much. I keep for one reason only. It tells me how long it takes to go from page to another. For instance after selecting to Reply, I found that it took 2.844 sec. Pipeling seems to accomplish something, but nothing helps dramatically. But, I, personally, do not need exceptional speed, and never experienced sluggishness.

 

I did all that. Also tried Fasterfox - honestly didn't see that it helped.

The pages appear to load more quickly, but I still wait much longer than usual before I can type, click a link, or scroll, even on a page as simple as Google.

Since this is a fairly new problem (within the last 2 weeks) and I've tried numerous tweaks and changes without success, I tend to think that something automatically updated and caused the problem - maybe ZoneAlarm, an extension, or Firefox itself. I've tried uninstalling and re-installing all of these. I've run out of things to try. I guess that I'll have to use IE7 for awhile.

 

I would disable Zone Alarm, not uninstall/reinstall. I have doen away with Zone alarm, because it gave me repeated problems. I have used Sygate Personal Firewall for over an year with no problem.

 

Lee,

Try creating a new Profile, to test for corruption in your current Profile. Don't move anything to this newly created Profile, in order to see if there is a delay before you can type, or bring up web pages.

 

broni,

We have a forum for that very purpose, and we would prefer that Lee post that information on the appropriate forum. This is where a HijackThis log can be posted, and get expert help: Removing Spyware and Viruses