Possible bug in Firefox 2.0.0.12
March 16, 2008 | 8:57 amThis has been annoying me quite alot. I usually find Firefox fast, stable, and dependable. However, recently it started producing momentarily freezes when loading pages with many pictures, big content, or elaborate JavaScript (which i personally didn’t experience before in this high frequency). For example, loading up Qwaider Planet used to cause this behaviour.
Even worse, it started taking much longer than average loading up normal web pages. It would spend many seconds “looking up domains” (which might suggest a DNS issue). What’s odd is that it would do that after a few pages have been opened (i.e, it won’t happen when you first run firefox). However, i didn’t change my network configuration at all.
Anyway, this is all to say that something is wrong with the latest version of Firefox (version 2.0.0.12) and apparently other people have been experiencing this too. If you have been facing these problems (specially pages taking infinitely long to finish loading), i suggest rolling back to a previous version. I went back to 2.0.0.6 and that seemed to work fine. But don’t worry, i think the Mozilla community will release a fix soon.
Qwaider قويدر
On March 16, 2008 | 10:15 am“Used to”?
Does this mean that the bug is gone with QP? Because if not, I would like to investigate it
By the way, if the browser is taking too much time after the initial opening of the page then there might be something wrong with the cache. I think Fx has it’s separate DNS cache
Hani Obaid
On March 16, 2008 | 1:47 pmHello Za3tar,
I never had this issue with Qwaider planet, but I did have it on 1 or 2 sites on all versions of firefox from 1.5 all the way upto the version I”m currently running (3.0 beta).
If you want a workaround, you can:
a. Use IE for that site
b. Use the IE-view plugin, and set it to always load that site using the IE engine
c. Install a plugin called prefbar, which allows displaying a toolbar with individual checkboxes to instantly (on the fly) disable and enable things like (javascript, java, animations, flash, images, popups, cookies, etc.)
d. Stop using firefox all together
For me d is not an option since I use many features and extensions that are simply unavailable in IE. So far I’ve only hit 4 sites that I frequent, that must be loaded with IE. If you really like firefox, you can use the (report broken website) option in the help menu so that you will be sure someone will look into it.
Cheers
za3tar
On March 16, 2008 | 9:18 pmQwaider: no the problem with the site has disappeared when i downgraded my browser.
Hani: Thank you for your detailed support. I have personally found Firefox to be rather dependable, and these issues only showed up in 2.0.0.12 (at least for me). Launching IE for that site won’t work for me either since i am a linux user (and don’t want to run IE under “wine”). If i face consistent trouble, i do usually use SeaMonkey or Opera instead.
George Chernikov
On March 18, 2008 | 12:31 amYep, I’ve been having these issues as well! Going to roll back to an older version is FF is unusable for me right now.
Never thought I’d see the day when IE 7 is faster than FF…