Firefox slow to load

[Bruce Page]

My Firefox is extremely slow to load after first booting my PC up. I just timed it at 44.6 seconds. It loads up in only 3.5 seconds if it has been shut down & restarted in the same session. I can’t find anything wrong with my system. Anyone have a clue as to why? I’m running Firefox 3.6.3 on a windows XP 5.1 with SP3. I use Google News as my home page.
HELP! I’m almost ready to go back to IE!

[Jim Terrill]

My Firefox is extremely slow to load after first booting my PC up. I just timed it at 44.6 seconds. It loads up in only 3.5 seconds if it has been shut down & restarted in the same session. I can’t find anything wrong with my system. Anyone have a clue as to why? I’m running Firefox 3.6.3 on a windows XP 5.1 with SP3. I use Google News as my home page.
HELP! I’m almost ready to go back to IE!

Firefox holds and doesn't release RAM, so it may be holding a lot of the memory needed after it has been opened once, which makes it boot faster. I got rid of firefox after I got tired of it holding 500+mb if RAM after I had closed it. If you close FF, I think you can find out how much memory is being used by doing control+alt+del and one of the tabs should have memory usage. I know on my mac is was regularly over 500mb.


I'm on Google chrome now.

[John Schreiber]

. . .HELP! I’m almost ready to go back to IE!

No, not that.

I'd do a reinstall and hope that would take care of it. A couple of times I've had FF leave a copy of itself in memory when I close it. You can see it by looking at the list of Processes open in the Task Manager.

[Chris Kennedy]

After one of the most recent updates of Firefox, we started having a lot of trouble. We moved onto Chrome, and have found it really good. If you can't resolve your problems, I would suggest trying Chrome. Personally, I would suggest trying to send semaphore signals via webcam before using IE.

Cheers,

Chris

[Mitchell Andrus]

FF saves the last session so if you need to you can 'restore' lost tabs in the event McAffee or MS or your flavor security wonk does a re-boot at 3:00am. Also, it phones home for updates on start (IIRC). this can slow it down quite a bit. Just leave it running or set it so it doesn't do that. My machine is never off and Outlook, FF with SMC and a few others are open and ready for a 30 second glance.
.

[Bruce Page]

Thanks John, I uninstalled & reinstalled Firefox and after rebooting it took 1:46.1 to load. I rebooted again and it took 18.3 seconds to load. I can certainly live with that. Hopefully it will stay like that.
Funny, I leave my work PC running 24/7 but never my home PC.

[Curt Harms]

Thanks John, I uninstalled & reinstalled Firefox and after rebooting it took 1:46.1 to load. I rebooted again and it took 18.3 seconds to load. I can certainly live with that. Hopefully it will stay like that.
Funny, I leave my work PC running 24/7 but never my home PC.

If you already know this, slap me . Just because Windows shows a desktop doesn't mean it's ready to do anything. Watch your disk drive activity light. If you're doing a cold boot, start windows, go get a cup of your favorite beverage, drink half of it then try opening Firefox. This applies to WinXP. Win7 might be better. Vista was awful in this respect, at least on my ThinkPad.

[John Shuk]

I install internet service for people. I've stopped trying to use firefox to test for browsing. I try to use safari or google chrome if they have it loaded. Firefox just takes a long time to start and has too many prompts at times.

[David Drickhamer]

After reading these posts and getting tired of FF freezing I thought I'd try Chrome.
So far so good. Much faster. Thanks for the recommendations.

[Bruce Page]

After uninstalling and reinstalling FF it is loading better - not great, but better.

I installed Chrome and used it for a few days. I'm not sure if I like it or not. I think I'm too used to having all the buttons up on top.

So for now, I'm going to give FF another shot.