Why does it take so long to switch to a Facebook tab if a large number of photos have been previously viewed on it?
- I am on facebook
- I look through an album
- I close the album leaving facebook open
- I open a new tab, browse other websites for a short period, less than a minute I would say
- I click on the facebook tab, and there is a delay of several seconds before it opens. The more photos I had looked at previously, the longer it will take even though the album was closed.
- I click on the other tab that is open then immediately click on facebook tab, there is no delay.
- I go back to the other tab again, wait a short period, then click on facebook, once again there is a delay of several seconds.
This will keep happening until I close the facebook tab and open a new facebook tab. This only happens in Firefox. What the devil is going on here?
All Replies (6)
Could you try disabling graphics hardware acceleration? Since this feature was added to Firefox, it has gradually improved, but there still are a few glitches.
You might need to restart Firefox in order for this to take effect, so save all work first (e.g., mail you are composing, online documents you're editing, etc.). Then perform these steps:
- Click the orange Firefox button at the top left, then select the "Options" button, or, if there is no Firefox button at the top, go to Tools > Options.
- In the Firefox options window click the Advanced tab, then select "General".
- In the settings list, you should find the Use hardware acceleration when available checkbox. Uncheck this checkbox.
- Now, restart Firefox and see if the problems persist.
Additionally, please check for updates for your graphics driver by following the steps mentioned in the following Knowledge base articles:
Troubleshoot extensions, themes and hardware acceleration issues to solve common Firefox problems
Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL
Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us!
Thanks for the response. Sadly the suggestions you make have no effect on the problem. My graphics driver is up to date and I have tried with and without hardware acceleration with no perceptible difference.
That may be caused by Firefox cleaning up and releasing memory if you switch to another tab.
If you switch back to the tab then Firefox needs to rebuild the DOM of that page and if the DOM tree is complicated and long then this can take some time.
You can try to create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.
See "Basic Troubleshooting: Make a new profile":
There may be extensions and plugins installed by default in a new profile, so check that in "Tools > Add-ons > Extensions & Plugins" in case there are still problems.
If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from the old profile to that new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.
See:
Alas, a new profile and turning off extensions does not help. So what is this DOM business and how can I get it to work properly?
Sigh, so do I just use Internet Explorer then? Is that the solution but no one wants to say it?
I still remember all those years ago. Switching from IE for the first time, to this lightweight, fast, stable browser. It felt so fresh, you know, it was a great experience. Now though, it's far from it. And it's not just this particular problem, the whole experience feels sluggish and unreliable, and it just gets worse and worse.
You used to have a browser you could be proud of, so where did it go so very, very wrong?