<p>I’ve been a happy Firefox user for years, but the latest update - v.3.5 - seems to have slowed my browsing to a crawl, punctuated by freezes and crashes. (Has anyone else noted that?) I downloaded Google Chrome and my browsing speed is dramatically better, but some of the features are different. I hate to leave Firefox but unless I get some explanations (and a fix) I’m sticking with Chrome.</p>
<p>Yes, I thought it was my Internet provider. I have reset the modem. I finally switched back to IE,and it’s popping again. I am glad you posted this. I hope they are going to fix it soon.</p>
<p>I’ve been having trouble with Firefox freeing for some time now. Very disappointing. Some sites just don’t work with Firefox either, even if they say they do.</p>
<p>I haven’t had a freezing problem, but this site no longer remembers me, and come to think of it, it may be since the last update, I have to login every time and reset the color scheme as well, it’s incredibly annoying.</p>
<p>I don’t know what is up with Firefox, but Google Chrome is a lot faster than Internet Explorer. Anything but Microsoft is fine with me.</p>
<p>kluge, the same happened to me when I updated to 3.5. I googled a little and found that MANY people are having the same problem. I’m sure Mozilla is aware of it and I hope they’re working on it. Anyhow, I uninstalled and went back to v. 3.0.1.3 and things are much better. However, I’m beginning to see slowdowns with Firefox that weren’t there when I first started using it only a few months ago. I don’t know if it’s because of the add-ons I’m using or what. Maybe I should try Google Chrome…</p>
<p>Firefox has become lousy at blocking certain popups, particularity Netflix popups.</p>
<p>I’m not having problems and I usually DO with the Firefox upgrades, so maybe there is something incompatible going on with your computers. My husband and my IT director at work both swear by Firefox. As I said, I have had a lot of trouble in the past.</p>
<p>Firefox seems to have developed a bad case of “Microsoftitis” - loading down a good basic function with so many bells and whistles that they can’t help but trip each other up and make the whole thing crash/freeze/slow down. I’m finding Chrome to have some odd quirks - can’t block then [control U] to underline here, for example - but I can live without the extras better than I can handle the crashes/freezes and slooooow loading.</p>
<p>We’ve had the trouble on every machine we have - XP, Vista, fast, slow, whatever. Really annoying.</p>
<p>I would stay on 3.0 for now. I personally think that there’s less of a focus on performance since Mike Schroepfer left for Facebook. I do have some performance work on Firefox in the queue and there are people looking at the performance issues but features are what keep the browser market moving.</p>
<p>BTW, I have no performance problems with Firefox 3.5.2 (I think that’s the latest) on the systems where I run it but my hardware specs are often much higher than the average user. On my home desktop, I run my own custom 64-bit version of Firefox 3.0 which flies.</p>
<p>Less is more.</p>
<p>I had to restore the earlier version of Firefox because the new one just wouldn’t load on my pc. But even now that I’ve returned to the 3.0, every single time I log into my Yahoo mail account, the computer freezes up and I have to shut down. Is this a Firefox issue or Yahoo? I’m not sure.</p>
<p>Kluge, I have been having issues with slowness with Firefox for a long time, and have been using Chrome since it first came out. I use Chrome for all my internet browsing - the only thing I really miss is Firefox’s ad block feature.</p>
<p>I am a web designer so I have to use all browsers, and I have an add-on webmaster toolkit in Firefox that is wonderful – I couldn’t live without it – so I usually have 3 browsers open on my computer. The Chrome engine is the same as Safari – so if I check my web pages in Chrome, Firefox & MSIE – then I can be pretty sure they are rendering ok for most users. </p>
<p>The first thing I would suggest with Firefox is that you try disabling ALL plug ins and see what happens. If that speeds things up, then add them back in one at a time and see where that gets you. I do think that Firefox has bloat problems, but some of the bloat is on the user end – every single add on is a potential problem.</p>
<p>Oh gosh. I’m glad I read this thread. I just ran upstairs to tell son not to update firefox on his laptop. After the mess we’re currently having with the last Apple download on our one year old MacBooks, the last thing we need to deal with is for his new Dell laptop to have a problem with a firefox update.</p>
<p>I noticed the same problems with Firefox in the last 3 days, so I just now deleted and re downloaded and installed it. Now it seems to be fine. [I have a sneaking suspicion that Yahoo might be “helping” Microsoft out somehow, i.e sabotaging Firefox, now that Yahoo and Microsoft have a new search agreement.] Either that or the update really messed things up. So I advise all not to update Firefox but download a new installation.</p>
<p>Correction- I am still on 3.0 with no problems. I won’t do the update.</p>
<p>3.0.13. Works fine.</p>
<p>Those that are having trouble, are you on a PC or a Mac? I haven’t had any trouble on my Mac, so I was curious.</p>
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<p>Engineers live for adding functionality or making something better and Firefox is a product of engineers. I generally work in the area of making it faster so it is annoying when you improve performance in an area by 20% and then someone adds functionality that uses up your performance gains.</p>
<p>I noticed that Tab Mix Plus (one of my favorite extensions) isn’t running on 3.5 yet which probably means that a lot of users are still on 3.0.</p>
<p>There is one performance improvement on 3.5 that is worth upgrading to if there aren’t other performance issues to deal with. 3.5 introduced nanojit which is a just-in-time compiler for Javascript. A lot of sites use heavy Javascript today which is the motivation for the project. Google Chrome used a compiled Javascript engine from Sweden I think when it came out which explains its good Javascript performance. Andreas Gal worked on the nanojit stuff and it resulted in a big Javascript performance improvement. Unfortunately, it appears that other things are slower in Firefox now.</p>
<p>Scout, my slowdown was on my PC. I also use Firefox on my Mac laptop and that one is fine.</p>