General Discussions

**Learning Newbie** · 11-08-2007, 12:58 PM

I've had to forcibly exit FF 3 times so far this morning, and I've been at work for all of 20 minutes. Anybody else having issues? Looks like Google changed up the look and feel a bit, but they must have also changed the AJAX scripting, because my browser just hangs. I can't even get to another tab to browse around while I wait.

Anyone else?

**angele803** · 11-08-2007, 05:34 PM

I don't use Gmail, but I was having problems with FF last night. I was trying to register to enter a contest at Doritos' web site (I know that sounds like a joke, but I am serious). All I was trying to do was submit a form and it locked up FF 3 times before I gave in and logged on with IE *shudder*. It worked fine in IE.
Why would a form lock up FF and not IE?
Maybe there is some bug in FF that will be fixed soon???

**joder** · 11-08-2007, 06:18 PM

I haven't had problems with either Firefox and Gmail.

**Kenny08** · 11-08-2007, 07:01 PM

Firefox does lock up on me randomly. But not form or gmail related

**KenPaulio** · 11-08-2007, 09:07 PM

Yeah using Firefox for the past year I never had a problem with GMail

**zeruel** · 11-09-2007, 01:08 AM

I'm having problems also with my gmail... i guess they changed something with their settings...

sometimes it's slower than before...

**vangogh** · 11-09-2007, 01:41 AM

John, Firefox 3 isn't actually out yet. What you have at best is the public beta, although I thought that wasn't going to be available till tomorrow.

Chances are what you have is a buggy pre beta version of FF3. My guess is it will work with Gmail once the final version is ready, especially since there are some Google engineers who work on Firefox from my understanding.

**w3bmaster** · 11-09-2007, 04:33 PM

I use FF and Gmail and no prolems for me

**joder** · 11-28-2007, 11:35 AM

I came across this link you might find interesting
http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-bro...ng-out-of-time

**Learning Newbie** · 11-28-2007, 02:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vangogh

Chances are what you have is a buggy pre beta version of FF3. My guess is it will work with Gmail once the final version is ready, especially since there are some Google engineers who work on Firefox from my understanding.

I'm confused? I'm using the mainstream version of FireFox 2.0.0.10 - I haven't tried any FF beta?

**tripy** · 11-28-2007, 02:31 PM

Quote:

I've had to forcibly exit FF 3 times

I guess someone didn't payed enough attention at your sentence...

That apart, I too had some problems with gmail, and one day, I had a litlle message on top of my gmail page saying that firebug could be a serious slowdown to firefox.
Maybe it's your issue too.

And if you are irritated by those lock up in the gmail page, they are now accessible via an imap+ssl connection.
It's just neat!

**vangogh** · 11-28-2007, 03:28 PM

My bad John. Thierry is right and I didn't pay enough attention. I saw FF 3 and since I had just read something about the beta version of FF3 coming moments before reading your post I jumped to the wrong conclusion.

The problem you're having is likely an extension and not FF itself. One extension I've noticed having problems with Google related sites is the Compete Toolbar. It through off my ability to use Google Analytics for awhile. Firebug is another possible culprit as Thierry mentioned.

Also try searching with phrases related to the problem to see if someone else has already figured out which extension is the guilty one.

It's a pain, but you may have to disable or uninstall extensions one at a time until you figure out which one is causing the problem. I've been wishing FF would allow you to order the extensions you've added by date to make it easier to find problem extensions.

**Learning Newbie** · 11-28-2007, 04:13 PM

Good catch, Thierry! I guess I could have been a little more clear. I'm running FF 2, but 3 times in a row on that particular day it crashed on me. Now that you pointed that out, I can see how it could be confusing.

I got the same message one day, I think last week. Saying FireBug will slow gmail down because the networking (ie how long all the files take to get) tab tracks all the AJAX. So I went and disabled FireBug on gmail. But I still get my entire browser to crash, almost at random. Maybe less often lately, but still just at random. It also will sometimes not really do anything when I click to log in. I think a script times out. It's annoying, and I wonder if it's related?

Steve - what's the Cmpete Toolbar? I might have to check that out. I'm running SEO Quake, FireBug, SGML Parser, IE tab, FireFTP, and Alexa. The hard thing about trying to pin the tail on the plugin is that I don't know of any action I can take to force gmail to crash my browser.

**vangogh** · 11-29-2007, 09:29 PM

Compete is site that collects general browsing stats. I guess it's similar in that sense to Alexa, except that many people think it's more accurate.

Do you know when the crashes started happening? Around the time you started this thread I suppose? Try disabling any extensions you added just before the crashes started and then use gmail like usual for a few days to see if the crashes are still happening.

You should be able to figure out the guilty extension with a little trial and error. You might have to uninstall the externsion instead of just disabling.

**Big Metal Dude** · 11-30-2007, 08:15 PM

The only problem I've had with FireFox is that it occasionally just shuts itself down. Tad bit strange and frustrating, but I deal with it just fine.

**Learning Newbie** · 12-03-2007, 05:10 PM

I've uninstalled ALL plug ins, and still FireFox occasionally hangs, white screen of impatience or death (whatever you prefer). This started a few days before I posted this thread, right after gmail made a set of interface changes. Minor ones it seemed, but that's when their FireBug warning came up.

Looks like I may need to start using a different browser.

**vangogh** · 12-04-2007, 12:19 AM

John do you know of a browser that doesn't occasionally hang? Firefox will sometimes hang for me as well, but so did IE. At least when Firefox hangs it doesn't take Windows with it.

FF3 is supposed to be coming out before too long with claims of fixing the memory leak problems. Hopefully that's true.

**ForrestCroce** · 12-04-2007, 02:37 AM

This may sound fanatical, but my experience has shown Opera to be a browser that doesn't hang. It'll make you wait for a result from the server before it renders a page, like all browsers, but the "white screen of impatience" has never happened to Opera while I've been at the helm.

The white screen happens when an application stops responding; the calls for the window to redraw itself stop being answered, so until it resumes life or you kill it, the application stops being able to show any progress it might be making. Opera seems to use worker threads for everything, so that if one takes a long time to complete, or gets 'blocked' the ui thread continues to deal with the message pump, responding not only to "redraw me" messages, but everything you do with the mouse or keyboard, scrips in other tabs, or whatever. Ironically, Microsoft has been preaching that style of coding for a few years, but are some of the worst offenders.

Anyway, that's hanging, not crashing. I haven't seen that, either, but it's a lot harder to guess about that part of their code.

**vangogh** · 12-04-2007, 11:06 PM

Interesting Forrest. I've suspected for awhile that Opera might be the best of breed when it comes to browsers, but I can't say to have used it much.

When I have I've noticed it does seem to load pages and itself a little faster than the other two.

**Nathand** · 12-04-2007, 11:30 PM

I've been having the exact same problems as you. Eventually I just re-installed FireFox, which seemingly fixed the issue. Weird. I with Google hadn't "upgraded" Gmail.