In the past week or so Firefox has been very slow and generally unpredictable on my machine. I’ve done a bit of everything to try and correct it– reinstalled Firefox, upgraded to Windows XP SP2, upgraded my various security software (firewall, AV, anti-spyware), disabled various bits of software, etc. I tried a bit of everything and nothing seemed to work.
Eventually I started tracing the patterns of when Firefox would lock-up, and it was each time a new browser window was spawned. I started uninstalling all of the features which seemed like they might calling out to the intarweb or somehow interfering with network calls each time a new window was spawned, including Live HTTPHeaders, BugMeNot, GMail Notifier, and ForecastFox.. none of these seemed to help the problem.
Finally I did the thing I should of done from the beginning when I had these problems– tried to see what Firefox wanted to connect to when it spawned a new window. I noticed an outgoing connection to nettripper.com each time a new window was spawned. I went to Google that domain, and as it turns out, that’s the site for the SwitchProxy extention. I assume it’s maybe just checking for an update or something, but I haven’t actually looked at what it sends/recieves there, so I can’t comment on it at the moment. Anyhow, I uninstalled the SwitchProxy extention, and suddenly Firefox doesn’t suck again. What a pain!
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Ive noticed the same thing, and decided to do a google search of switchproxy being slow(thats how i found this), and i found a site that has other firefox extensions, and seen that others had this problem, it was because the SwitchProxy extension is trying to contact the the site of the person that made it, and its connecting to search for updates, and what u need to do is go to preferences for SwitchProxy extension and uncheck the box that says “Notify me of updates”, that should fix the problem, the reason it is slow is because the site it searches for updates on is down, and it cant contact the site, disabling auto-updates helped me, hope it works for you…
Thanks #1, mine’s been freezing up recently too, I bet this will be the end to my issues.
It gets even better with portablefirefox … the thing completely hung on startup, 99% of the time, and the other 1% of the time it hung right after the home page had been loaded. XP in the end I had to kick it into offline mode to change the settings properly. Thanks commenters for helping me pin it down!
yyyyyyup ~ on both desktops and the laptops. wtf?!?! Thanks for the help zooming in on this, I thought I was going insane.
We had the same problem with switchproxy. Initially thought it was firefox update hanging.
Thank you very much for the insight; it was driving me nuts!
i dont have switch proxy installed and still firefox freezes after 3 secs of streaming and there is no sound too. please somebody help, cuz IE is driving me nuts.
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