The address bar may be retrieving bookmarks, history, open tabs, and/or search suggestions when you start to type, so a hangup with any of those might delay things. Is there any pattern to what you are starting to type when this problem occurs?

Or does this occur before you can type anything?

There's no discernible pattern as it can happen as early as one or two characters in. But you could be right in that it freezes when it matches with one of history, bookmarks, etc. If I could reproduce the error, I could tell you if it happens with new searches too (no lookups available)

You might make a backup and then run the "Verify Integrity" function.

Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles

You can find the "Verify Integrity" function on the Troubleshooting Information page. Either:

• "3-bar" menu button > "?" Help > Troubleshooting Information
• (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
• type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

You can use Find (Ctrl+f) to search for integrity to get to the Places database section. Note that this function takes a long time to run.

Tried it out. Problem persists.

Here's a possible pattern but again cannot confirm if this is always true. I've noticed that when typing in the url bar the cursor is in the area below, where the suggestions drop down appears and subsequently falls on one of the matches. Could that be a possible cause?

agent-jay said

Here's a possible pattern but again cannot confirm if this is always true. I've noticed that when typing in the url bar the cursor is in the area below, where the suggestions drop down appears and subsequently falls on one of the matches. Could that be a possible cause?

Perhaps. Firefox does some predictive pre-fetching and pre-connecting if it has high confidence that it knows what you are going to click on next. Could you try disabling all the kinds of pre-fetching and pre-connecting described in the following article to see whether that makes any difference: How to stop Firefox from making automatic connections. That may slow all other page loads just a tiny bit, but I think we need to test it.

Try the Firefox version from the official Mozilla server if you currently use a version from the repositories of your Linux distribution.

@cor-el Trying the official repo version doesn't do anything. @jscher2000 I'll try and let you know. Thanks