Firefox Hangs On Startup For Around 10 Seconds

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deadman_uk

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 30, 2003
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I've been running Mozilla Firefox 3.6 fine for a while until one day, everytime I loaded it, it would become unresponsive for approximately 10 seconds. After this, it would operate fine until I close/reopen it, then it would hang again. I thought an upgrade to Firefox 4 beta 7 would fix this but this too suffers the same problem. I have created a new, bare profile (without extensions etc) on Firefox 4 but even this hangs at startup.

Any ideas?

BTW, the PC in my sig is not the PC I am having problems with. The Firefox problem happens on an AMD Phenom x4.
 
have you cleared cache ? while you may have removed all extensions, have you also stopped FF
from automatically searching for any updates, whether to itself or to any possible extensions ? do
you have any other program that is also searching for a connection at the same time as FF is starting ?
 
Hi,

Yes, I have cleared out the cache, history etc. I also visited Tools>>Options>>Advanced>>Update tab and unticked all the update options but this did not help. I am not aware of any other program that could cause this in the background, I have turned off BitComet, Xfire and Steam.
 
I know you tried a new profile, but I'd try a completely fresh instance of Firefox using the portable version. If you still encounter the same issues, the problem probably isn't Firefox...
 
Run Procmon while firefox starts and see if you can tell what it is doing (opening a registry key, writing to a file, etc)
 
Launch FireFox (safe-mode) and see if it still hangs.

If it launches normally then it's a plug-in or extension that's causing it.

If it's still launching slowly, download and run SpeedyFox to clean up the FF files.
 
Thanks all for your replies but:

thefreeaccount said:
Run Procmon while firefox starts and see if you can tell what it is doing (opening a registry key, writing to a file, etc)
Click to expand...

Just tried this and it appears it's the custom fonts I installed. I originally installed custom fonts without any slow down from Firefox but I had a font sort out recently, removing some and replacing with others. How do I stop Firefox from scanning the font folder? Google Chrome doesn't have this problem. I noticed the "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above" setting in Firefox options. Unticking this completely fixes the slow down but now some web pages don't look good. I don't wish to uninstall the custom fonts, I need them for Photoshop work. I have 1480 fonts in total.
 
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Any ideas guys? It's not good viewing Firefox the way it is now (with websites unable to select the font they use)
 
Unfortunately, I think you have run headfirst into two known firefox bugs:
1) It scans every font on the system every time it starts up, causing very slow startup when you have a lot of fonts on your system. This is being worked on: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600713
2) Some people have reported that replacing or deleting fonts causes FF to hang on startup. Supposedly, the problem persists even after you copy the original fonts back.

Disabling the 'allow pages' thingy probably speeds up startup because FF scans the fonts asynchronously in the background unless it runs into a web page that uses one of the fonts that hasn't been loaded yet. In that case, the UI locks up until it reads the relevant font. Does setting your homepage to blank fix the problem?

Your best bet might be to post a report on their bugzilla and see if any Firefox developers can help you. If you can, you might want to install xperf and include the xperf trace in your bug report. Good luck
 
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Try using CCleaner to clear Firefox's cache, etc. My FF beta 7 hangs on startup every once in awhile. I just need to run CCleaner and it's fixed.
 
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