Firefox 3.5 and the Beach Ball
I’m using Firefox 3.5 on Leopard, and noticing several slowdowns.
When we say Firefox 3.5 is fast, we mean it sometimes slows down. And by “sometimes slows down”, we mean the spinning beach ball of death.
Here are two cases where I see problems.
First, I see a severe slowdown in the Amazon.com search field. The slowdown occurs when I type a few characters and then hit the “:” key. For instance, try searching for “Bitter:Sweet”. Who knows if this is an Amazon or a Firefox problem. I just know it is slow.
The second slowdown was far worse. It occurred as I was creating my previous blog post. Ironically, I wanted to include a link to the HTML 5 specification. So in my first tab I had my blog open, and in the second tab I had the HTML 5 specification open.
I found the section on HTML video, selected the URL, and copied to the clipboard. When I returned to my blog page, Firefox completely locked up and I saw the spinning beach ball of death. I had to kill the process to regain control.
I repeated the above steps, and once again it completely locked up.
I finally managed to create that post, but only without the HTML 5 spec page open. So just now, while typing the previous paragraph, I again opened this URL.
And once again, Firefox became completely unresponsive, showing the beach ball for about 15-30 seconds.
It is mildly amusing that the one page that consistently brings Firefox 3.5 to its knees is the HTML 5 specification page.
same problem here with the old 3.0.11 version
Firefox 3.5 on Windows Vista (woo!) freezes as it loads, but it eventually rights itself. It is interesting that the page can be so heavy as to cause Firefox to strain.
Takes a lot of processor to load on Ubuntu as well.
Amazon has problems in their ordering process under V3.5 I didn’t see in earlier versions of firefox. Basically it throws me into a loop within the Amazon site and you cannot complete the order, instead putting you into some marketing screens instead of the next step in the order process.
Startup problems on Windows are because, for reason I don’t pretend to understand, FireFox seeds it’s crypto random generator by reading the Windows temp. files, IE cache etc. etc. This tends to thrash the disk. Hopefully 3.5.1 will make use of each O/S proper random source.
Bug for that is : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501605
Absolutely insane… a Mac dual G5 brought to a standstill by clicking a field. To me that’s like smashing a feather with an anvil and having it break (or Curly’s head with an axe.)
I had the same problem as Tinger reported on July 6 two days ago (Jul 26). Reported it to Amazon, who did reply, and Mozilla, who, as of this date…
I went shopping again today and no problems. Maybe it’s fixed, maybe the gremlins were outside having a smoke.
Same here!
Actually I wrote an article about Firefox 3.5 performance
http://hnaser.blogspot.com/2009/08/firefox-35-is-buggy.html
Same beachball in Snow Leopard. It happens to me when I close FF — like 5 – 6 seconds of beach ball before anything happens.
Firefox 3.5.3 is giving me a lot of beach balls. It started very recently, maybe 3.5.3, maybe 3.5.0, but it was not that way previously. It always comes back to responsive after 5 to 25 seconds. It does seem to be a DNS thing, as sometimes I get a “page not found” (but beach ball goes away), and a “Try Again” finds it almost immediately most of the time. Most beach balls just go away, though, and the flow continues after waiting [im]patiently.
I’ve been running into this a lot, lately as well. I seem to get it most often when I switch tabs. Change tabs an wham, my machine beachballs for 10-20 seconds. It was NOT doing this on the original 3.5 which seemed smokin’ fast compared to 3.x. Now, however FF can bring my dual core w/4GB of RAM to a halt. It always rights itself, but try and get any work done when every time you try to do something you have to wait 20 seconds.
Come on FF, get this fixed quickly!
Interesting, I took the advice above and disabled most of my plugins. Have not seen the BBOD lately
Thanks!