Firefox problem only with Samsung notebooks

I'm having the oddest problem and after hours upon hours of reading through Mozilla forums and other Googling (doesn't seem to be an appropriate forum on NBR) to no avail. What's so weird about the problem is that it sounds very generic to Firefox bugs, but it happens only on my Samsung machines - and I have 4 others!

Here's the thing: when I go to Firefox (my main browser for more than a decade!) I can't make anything happen (navigate, scroll, etc) for about 10-15 seconds. The screen turns milky white and the bar at the top says "Mozilla (Not Responding). Admittedly, it's an annoyance, not a serious issue, but it seems like it should not be impossible to fix on such a superb machine (NP940X3G - and had the same problem on the previous NP93xxx) and there seems to be something quirky about Samsung software that is causing this problem. I have taken all the add-ons away and it didn't help the problems.

It's driving me buggy, as this is my stellar machine and I have to tell people: "hold on, we need to wait 15 seconds before we can do this!" Reminds me of an old machine with a slow HDD!

Anyone else having this problem? Any thoughts.

 

Firefox is behaving OK on my NP900X4C. I've got over 50 tabs open and it's using over 1GB RAM but running at reasonable speed. I wonder if something has got messed up in your installation.

I would suggest you backup your Firefox user data then uninstall Firefox and clean up all traces before reinstalling.

John

 

Thank you John. Regrettably I've tried that twice already. I use a pretty good Uninstaller I've found to be better than Revo ("ADVANCED Uninstaller Pro" http://www.advanceduninstaller.com...FF on any of their computers? Thanks, Jeff

 

It's a while since I've had such a problem that required a deep clean. Ccleaner sometimes clears left-over files.

Have you also cleared out Flash and Java? in my experience the latter sometimes seems to carry across settings between different browsers on the same computer. Some months back I had a problem on one computer with a script on my on-line banking web site that got stuck in a loop and defied my attempts to trouble-shoot and eventually got fixed by reinstalling Windows.

I'm using Windows 7 at the moment but I wonder if you've encountered a rare bug that is challenging for the developers to identify and fix.

John

 

Have you disabled all the add-ons? Firefox rarely gives me any issues, it's my sandbox browser.

 

It's a while since I've had such a problem that required a deep clean. Ccleaner sometimes clears left-over files.

Have you also cleared out Flash and Java? in my experience the latter sometimes seems to carry across settings between different browsers on the same computer. Some months back I had a problem on one computer with a script on my on-line banking web site that got stuck in a loop and defied my attempts to trouble-shoot and eventually got fixed by reinstalling Windows.

I'm using Windows 7 at the moment but I wonder if you've encountered a rare bug that is challenging for the developers to identify and fix.

John


Sorry, Tapatalk is making it hard to respond to both of you in one post

@John Ratsey: good idea about removing Flash. I'll also try CC Cleaner to uninstall.

@go45cvi: I have cleared out my addons and that didnt seem to fic it, but Im going to uninstall and reinstall and remove them and see if I get lucky. What perplexes me is why the same addons with the same OS and FF version would work fine on one computer and not the other.

Many thanks,
Jeff

 

Bump! (As you'll read below, I've gotten nowhere on this problem after countless hours so I'm going back to the well to see if something jogs the "brain trust" you represent in my NBR world!

I hate to be annoying but I've tried all of your suggestions and quite a few from Mozilla forums and no joy at all. FWIW, this is purely an FF problem - the machine screams through other browsers and applications - recently tested PC Mark 7 and scored a 5,850 - and memory and cpu usage are normal when running FF, turbos up to 2.9 with ease during benchmarks.

I've run in FF Safe Mode and the problem doesn't occur but it removes all my add-ons, the main reason I love this browser so much. I've also manually disabled all addons in non-Safe mode and the problem persists. (might it be necessary to uninstall them rather than just disable? I do get periodic error messages about scripts stopping and have read there may be come correlation, but I don't know what do try to see if this is the problem, nor what to do to cure the problems with scripts. I have removed Flash and Java (from the machine, right, not just the FF Plugins for these?) and I get what I would call partial improvement. But it's impractical to have those both disabled so even if they cured the problem how do I run the still-50%+ apps that use particularly Java?

One last thing I haven't mentioned before: I find that even when I'm not experiencing the freeze/hang problem, responses are noticeably slowed - again, in FF only. Even things such as closing windows seem to have a brief delay and occasionally I'll find typed characters delay a second or two before appearing on the screen,

This is so frustrating - all the more so since none of you have reported any problems of this nature at all. There are hundreds of such reports in the Mozilla forums, but there are as many solutions proposed as there are reports of the problem (ideas submitted largely by people who haven't experienced the problem, precious few who report they had the problem and this is what fixed it for them.) Then there is the cold comfort of large numbers of "Me Too" in response to posts about the problem!

You guys are truly a brain trust, particularly with software, so I am imploring to impose on you once again for any thoughts you may be able to come up with.

Thanks very much, Jeff

 

I want to thank you all for your suggestions. I'm happy to say that I found a resolution to my problems with FF by simply going back - for the 3rd or 4th time in some cases! - and re-trying previously unsuccessful approaches and am back to extremely fast and smooth operation from the browser. After so many tries of both "the usual suspects" and approaches familiar to me that just didn't seem to make a difference I just went back to the basics from this post and, in essence, for the second or third time, performed a "Reset Firefox" operation - which is entirely different from uninstalling and re-installing the program. The first thing I noticed is that all my history was intact and the browser once again booted up in 1 second (with 5 pinned tabs attached) and the infernal delays and hangs with the obnoxious "Mozilla is not responding" have disappeared!

I don't believe any of you specifically recommended the "Reset Firefox" option - though doing so surely took care of many/all of the individual suggestions you made. But for future reference, that particular routine, linked here In Uninstalling - even with a program that catches related files and registry entries -there are still apparently values that are not reset to defaults that retain some temporary files, including corrupt ones. The programs I used included Revo Uninstaller, CC Cleaner and Advanced Uninstaller Pro, none of which did the trick. (BTW, the link to the Firefox Reset operation is nothing more than going to and clicking on the Help icon (a tiny "?" in the lower right corner of the relatively new FF Control Panel) and select "Reset Firefox to it's Default status." It will wipe out all of your add-ons and change a number of settings to their defaults but surprisingly, as I added back all of my add-ons - and my multiple pinned pages that load with each boot-up of FF - nothing presented itself as a cause of the problem.

Thanks for your patience hanging in there with me.

 

Thanks for the update. I'm pleased to read that your persistence paid off.

I didn't know there was a Reset option in Firefox.

Something, as we suspected, must have got corrupted but was hidden in some obscure place. I often yearn for the good old days when everything to do with a program was in one folder.

John

 

I feel you (American slang for "I fully understand and empathize!), especially after what I just went through with the FF issue and the brightness adjustments in, I counted, up to 19 places!

I have to say that my observation is that, as fine machines as Samsung makes they are diminished by their software and attempts to provide a lot of user-customization, with an overwhelming number of choices (normally something I adore in a device!) but, as you describe, so many disparate locations where these are found and - another design fault common to all of their mobile products (I own a Note 8 tablet and a gs4 phone), factory default settings that are too often not satisfactory for many users. Interestingly, I find the overall usability of their tablets far better than computers or phones. My Note 8 is my favorite device and it uses a variation of Touch Wiz that I judge to be among the best Android front ends out there with many of the GSx phone features but a far more intuitive interface.

All things considered though, I'll take the magnificent hardware and the operational flexibility over the one-size-fits-none approach of, say, Apple, at thr other end of the spectrum. Still, without a John Ratsey and dannemand I think I would have returned this puppy weeks ago! Thank you so much.