A Firefox bleg

My firefox always works fine except occasionally it will crash on LSB. It’s the only site it’s ever crashed on that I can remember.

Have you tried the forums at mozilla.org? They’re pretty helpful over there.

In the meantime there’s an option to have it restore where you were at either after closing the browser or it crashing, so if you don’t have that enabled I’d do that so you wouldn’t have to open your tabs again.

May not apply since I know virtually nothing about Dell Inspirons (and how they microcode protected lower memory). Install Registry Repair Pro. I hope you mean tabs, not that many separate windows. You are not exceeding any particular number of open applications, but your registry may be fragmented with so many interrupts to handle addressing on. Just a notion. Repair Pro does not assume you know how to regedit or otherwise manipulate your registry – it’s a naive interface. Just tell it to clean up your registry, then to defrag it. Might help overall performance as well.

The newest release has crashed a few times on me as well. And yeah sometimes what caused it to crash is going to do the exact same thing when you restore.

Best advice i can give is backup your bookmarks, etc and uninstall then reinstall the app.

Has caused me nothing but trouble whenever I’ve tried to use it through out the years. I’d uninstall that first and see if it solves your issues.

(as I tie an onion to my belt)?

Firefox is absolutely horrid for effective use of RAM – I’ve got 3 tabs open and I’m near 500 MB. Of course, I use the Firebug and the Webmaster Tools add-ons.

Norton/Symantec products have active background processes in addition to their major application interfaces. I would be surprised if there’s a “live” scan going on as you download pages, ads, images, video, etc. through your browser. This could be causing the smaller delays that you see. The RAM charge from the background processes typically aren’t large enough to cause a problem – unless it keeps hibernating in the swap file and thrashing back and forth for live scans.

The big culprit is most likely your limited RAM.

Is to backup and delete your Firefox “Profile” which is the folder that contains all of your history, passwords, customizations, etc. You definitely want to backup your bookmarks in that situation and restore them once you create a new Profile. Unlike just uninstalling Firefox, this removes any of the files Firefox creates on your machine, for the most part. This might be an option in the uninstall process, but there are manual ways of doing it, too.

I don’t agree that it’s a tab vs windows things, or that adblock or a reinstall is going to be more effective than resetting your Profile.

Extensions can have an effect on Firefox. Norton may, too. I wouldn’t know.

I can dig up some howto on dealing with Firefox profiles, if you need.

As a techie…

*You need more RAM… With 1 GB, I am assuming your running XP Professional? It was designed for IE 7, not Firefox, you need to upgrade laptop to Vista. People bitch and bitch about Vista but actually for web browsing I have had limited issues. The newer versions of Vista work quite well.

*Use tabs, new windows load a whole new script in your processing code, which is what takes up RAM, and with Firefox each script is huge because it features tabs which means you have to fit multiple windows in each script code.

*Virus Scanners usually have a web check feature that scans your browsing, can cause slowing.

If I was to suggest something, I would do the following… Buy this laptop-

It has 4GB of RAM which is great for new firefox and multitasking, the processor is fast and perfect for Vista, and as of Jan 2009 Dell was putting Vista SP2 on all machines so you are good to go, Vista wont give you problems. And, with that great of a processor you could upgrade to Windows 7 later this year with no problem.

If you want a good, free anti virus, I’d go with the free version of AVG (you kind of have to look closely at their website because they do have some they sell – also good software). Besides it being free, they update it daily with the latest files.

Another one that isn’t quite as intrusive as Norton is Trend Micro. Some computer places use it and won’t touch Norton because of its use of RAM.

as well, all the time. It was frustrating, but I thought it was just my computer, since I ended up having to reload Windows completely around two weeks ago. But the exact thing started happening to me a few weeks before the reinstall. I use Chrome now, so much faster and have not had a crash. I only use FF now for one specific client’t website that somehow isn’t very compatible with Chrome.

Oh, and I have a Dell as well, but this is my desktop, I don’t use the laptop very often.

If you have an open socket, you should be able to get another 1 gig stick for less than 30 bucks. If you find the right sales guy, they might even install it for you- takes about 5 minutes.

Plus you kind of have to know what you’re doing to install an adblocker into it. However, looking at the task manager, it does consume less RAM than any of the others.

I’m no computer tech, but in my opinion, none of this was happening before the wide use of animated advertising ads. There are now as many as two or three per page on any site you go to and they are constantly changing and loading causing the crash for me. I have a Mac, and they just had Safari 4.0 installed which helped a lot but now is back to crashing again but not nearly as much. Safari is the same thing as far as the crashing.

it’s quite upsetting – there are industry pages that ALWAYS shut it down, so I have to remember to open those through IE

What it does do quite frequently is momentarily freeze up (and this isn’t just a problem on LSB) when I’m running a lot of windows at once or something, but if I leave it alone and don’t touch anything it’ll usually unfreeze after 10-30 seconds or so.