Why is my Firefox freezing/crashing so often?

Try disabling all of your plug-ins. Then add them one-by-one after using it to identify the problem plug-in.

Or move to Chrome, which is better :)

What’s throwing me is that this started suddenly. I have a similar setup and as soon as FF upgraded, I was having the same exact problem. The culprit, I’m pretty sure, was plugincontainer.exe, something Mozilla came up with to help keep FF from crashing entirely if one of your plug-ins crashed. Ironic.

My issue has mostly resolved itself with subsequent FF updates. Check out yor task manager when the freeze happens. If you close FF and it’s still running well after, there is your issue.

You could be using more RAM than your system actually has.

1. Go to My Computer > View system information. Click on the General tab. The amount of available RAM should appear there.

2. Open Windows Task Manager. Click on the Performance tab. The amount of RAM being used should be displayed in the lower left window.

If the amount shown in 1. is less than the amount shown in 2., then close all your internet connections until the amount of RAM shown in 2 is less than what’s shown in 1.

I was having the same trouble in 2008 because my PC was equipped with only 256 MB of RAM. I had two 256 MB RAM chips added and now my FF runs a lot longer before I get any RAM jam.

Did you update to Firefox 5 in that time? It came out recently.

Other ideas

> Update Flash Player which is usually the biggest memory hog.
> Firefox (or it’s plugins) is really bad about memory slowly “leaking” the longer it’s left open. Chrome does the same but not to the same degree and I’m sure there’s a good explanation but it’s a good idea to shut it down at least once a day. Sometimes this doesn’t close all open processes and you just have to either restart the computer or hunt them down like the lying dogs they are with task manager.

I would highly recommend switching out to Pale Moon it’s basically Firefox, but runs a hell of a lot better on Windows. All your plug-ins will be fine and compatible (granting you were already on FF5). Problems should hopefully cease!
Good luck and may the force be with you.

@Paul SeaMonkey is really cool too, its lightwierght and good on slow-as-sin computers but its loaded with features.

So far, I’ve disabled all of my plug ins and extensions, and have only re-enabled Ad Block Plus (how did I ever live without it?). Hasn’t frozen again, yet. Fingers crossed!

Oh, I also re-downloaded Flash.