Firefox hangs on startup
On Nov 4, for some reason, Firefox never loads and shows a window. I have auto update enabled, but I manually downloaded the latest version and it did not fix it. Today I installed version 8 and was hoping perhaps the disabling of add-ons during the install process might help, but the pop-up saying it was checking for add-ons compatibility hung. I've been using Firefox as my main browser for a long time, but I can't seem to get around this problem. I'm running Win 7. I'm having no issues at home on Win 7. This was not caused by installing a new version and I had not installed any add-on within the last month or so.
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I just realized that after Firefox hangs, everything I do on my system is very slow, in spite of the fact that task manager does not show any process hogging my two processors. This makes be think that the original reason I rebooted on Nov 4 due to my system being very slow could have been caused by Firefox and all reboots since then have failed to allow me to bring up Firefox. My system performance is fine until I try to load Firefox. I'm going to try uninstalling Firefox and re-installing to see if that has any benefit.
OK, I uninstalled Firefox, rebooted and then installed 8.0 again. This time it didn't say it was checking for compatibility with add-ons, but it still hung up. Eventually I cancel the process. I have no clue why this would start happening when I've had no issues with Firefox for years. Again, the hangs started without any update of any kind to Firefox or its add-ons. The only system change I am aware of was the install of software to run backups to Iron Mountain. I may uninstall that to see if it may be the culprit.
At the suggestion of someone who had resolved a similar problem, I used CCleaner to clean up my registry and the browser cache area. Now firefox comes up just fine. I don't know if it was a registry issue or something that went bad for one of the tabs I had open when it last worked, but the problem was not the add-ons as they are still there and working. I am curious as to whether firefox's analysis of add-on compatibility successfully completed since it hung when I first tried installed 8.0. This post is being made via firefox 8.0 and it seems to be working fine. I highly suspect some issue existed with the registry since whenever firefox did hang while loading, the rest of my system became very sluggish even though task manager did not show any process taking much time.
I continue to find that firefox hangs on startup. This appears to happen after my system crashes for reasons unknown. If I use CCleaner to remove the "Internet Cache, Cookies and Session" info for firefox, it then starts up just fine. Perhaps when the system crashes one of these files is left in a corrupted state that causes a problem when starting up such that it appears to hang? I'm not happy that I've had my win7 system crash (power goes off completely), but it seems odd that when this happens, only firefox has trouble re-starting. Clearing out the above listed items allows firefox to startup just fine (after having killed the hung process prior to cleaning up).
The default of the pref network.http.max-connections has been increased from 30 to 256 in Firefox 6+ versions.
Try to decrease the value of the pref network.http.max-connections from 256 to 30 as used in Firefox 3 versions.
See also:
- http://blog.bonardo.net/2011/09/30/is-your-firefor-freezing-at-regular-intervals
- Places Maintenance: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/places-maintenance/
Start Firefox in Diagnose Firefox issues using Troubleshoot Mode to check if one of the extensions or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem (switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox (Tools) > Add-ons > Appearance/Themes).
- Don't make any changes on the Safe mode start window.
- https://support.mozilla.com/kb/Safe+Mode
I will try that if this happens again soon. I'm hoping it won't happen if my system doesn't crash again. Thanks for the suggestion.