Firefox Performance Declining

[Greg]

I have to restart Firefox every few days because it gobbles up too memory and either becomes too slow or crashes. I have Adblock Plus, Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus, FiddlerHook, Ghostery, and Lightbeam extensions installed. FiddlerHook is most inactive most of the time, but I just disabled Lightbeam since it's isn't really all that useful. It almost looks as if Firefox (or an extension) has a memory leak since the memory usage goes way up over time.

 

I agree that it used to be a lot more stable than it has been lately. I normally keep about 10 tabs open since I refer to them continuously and don't close the browser. With the past few releases, it usually pops up a message saying something bad happened after a few days and has to restart.

[Guest]

Every few days? I don't know a single person who leaves their electronics on overnight. I'm constantly turning everything off after I use it; it's a habit actually. 

[Neovalen]

Every few days? I don't know a single person who leaves their electronics on overnight. I'm constantly turning everything off after I use it; it's a habit actually.

Ditto.

[SynthetikHD]

Modern computers, game consoles, and electronics in general are designed to kept in sleep mode instead of turning them off. There technically isn't any reason to ever completely shut off your computer, PS4, iPhone, or anything really. They are built to be put into sleep mode where they barely use any power, can download updates, defragment hard disks (if a computer), and can start back up instantly instead of booting up again.

 

With that said though, I always turn off my electronics anyways out of habit as well. Technically we are all only wasting our time by turning off our electronics instead of putting them to sleep...but old habits die hard.

[Spock]

With Firefox I use:

 

-Ghostery.

I would suggest switching to Disconnect. It's non proprietary and afaik has a slightly better list.

 

 

I have minimal plugins:

• Adblock Plus

You may notice a performance boost with uBlock. It has the nice bonus of disabling "You use adblock" and "Cookie user agreement" messages.

[TechAngel85]

Thanks, Spock. I'll try it out.

 

As for turning off my PC....That never happens. It goes into a sleep/hibernation mode after about an hour of non-use as long as a movie isn't playing.

[phazer11]

I would suggest switching to Disconnect. It's non proprietary and afaik has a slightly better list.

 

You may notice a performance boost with uBlock. It has the nice bonus of disabling "You use adblock" and "Cookie user agreement" messages.

Finally a fellow user of both!

uBlock definitely uses less RAM (among other things) and does it's job well (use it in Cyberfox as well as Chrome whenever I'm forced to use it). Disconnect is better (from my tests) than ghostery and is recommended by prism-break as well as the TOR-project.

Edit: Now that I look at it uBlock and Random Agent Spoofer are now on prism-breaks site under recommended browser add-ons.

[GrantSP]

Because of the recommendation to use Disconnect I have grabbed it and am currently trying it out, I'm a Ghostery user, so far so good.

Regarding uBlock, I notice a lot of comments about the current maintainer being a ******-bag because all he's done is taken the last snapshot of it and released it as his own. The original authors are apparently offering uBlock-Origin as the most up-to-date code for it. Thoughts on that?

 

PS. Sorry for taking over the topic @TechAngel85.

[SynthetikHD]

The general consensus is to use uBlock Origin instead of uBlock.

 

As far as I know, if you want to fully be protected in Firefox, all you need is:

• uBlock Origin
• NoScript

 

AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, Disconnent, and Don't Track Me are all junk I believe. They either log your activity or send it to their own servers like Ghostery, so I wouldn't use them.

[Spock]

I'm not sure about uBlock Origin and uBlock. I heared about some dirt being thrown but you know the internet - it's hard to tell who is right.

 

Disconnect isn't junk. It's no really necessary with uBlock but afaik it has got some good reviews by people who know what they are talking about. Ghostery indeed collects data by default.

 

A friend of mine told me there is an extension that randomly clicks banners, even behind an ad blocker. He also told me there is an extension that randomly starts google searches in the background. Both to mess with the more sophisticated google tracking system. Is anyone knowing more?

 

NoScript is too annoying for my taste. Moving the windows firewall to group policy (so no program can write exceptions), not allowing flash, MSE and avoiding xxxfreedownload.ru did the job very well for me so far.

[TechAngel85]

I just installed uBlock Origin. I'll see how it goes verses Adblocker Plus.

[TechAngel85]

I've restarted FF in Safe Mod this evening. I'll report back if I find a difference in a few days.

 

...man, I forgot how many ads there are on the internet!

[Greg]

Have you tried Cyberfox yet? I installed it yesterday with uBlock Origin and so far it seems to be working fairly smoothly. I left Firefox and Cyberfox running last night with the same plugins and the same tabs open. When I got up this morning, Firefox was toast and Cyberfox was still working fine. This was a really bizarre problem I hadn't seen before, though. I could click on any tabs, but Firefox wouldn't activate them. When i closed all the tabs, Firefox was left with this weird screen with no tabs at all and wouldn't close.

[TechAngel85]

No, I haven't. I'm going to see how this turns out. If it's the same result, I'll know it's not a plugin. I've reloaded all my tabs and used most of them for a bit. Before I restarted FF was sitting with a 1.4GB memory usage. So far, I'm up to about 800MBs but I'm going to give it a few days to have a fair comparison.

[DoubleYou]

It's battle of the browsers, and I believe in competition. I left Chrome there for the past year for Firefox. Now I'm back on Chrome again. Firefox was taking 15 seconds to start up (WT!?). Chrome, like 3 seconds.

 

I'll switch back to Firefox wants Chrome starts acting up again.