Firefox changing tabs is slow

Question

How can I diagnose the problem behind the delay I get when changing tabs in Firefox? It is up to about 1.5 seconds.

To provide some background, I use three monitors and often have three Firefox windows open at the same time. My machine should be fast enough, it is a AMD Phenom II X6 1055T at 2.8GHz, a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 and 4GB of RAM.

The issue appears to be stronger for some webpages. For example, the Wordpress backend, the FireFTP addon tab, Google Mail, are slower than simple pages like Google Search, or static HTML pages.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 07 '13 at 15:31

2

The scripting console provided by the Firebug addon caused the performance issue. I only noted that when reading a notification integrated into the extension, stating that this is a known issue and will be fixed soon.

answered Oct 07 '13 at 15:31

danijar

399

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 07 '13 at 13:43

It sounds like you end up having to wait for something that is not related to CPU/memory, unless your computer in general is performing badly for some reason, but if you have lagg when scrolling, you may have video driver issues.

What you might end up waiting for is probably the mass storage, if you are using an SSD this would only happen if windows for some reason is shutting it down, you should be able to adjust such settings from the power options advanced part.

If you are using a HDD this might be of a similar nature, with the HDD being powered down to save power. Or, it is simply how long it takes for the cache file to be read. Try crystal Disk Mark to see how well your drive is performing, and you might try to find a setting in firefox to make it use more ram and rely less on cache.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 24 '13 at 22:28

1

In my case, it was due to an extension called QuickShare Widget. I disabled it and tabs and close button started to work just fine!

To disable, go to Tools-->Add-Ons-->Extensions, then disable the QuickShare Widget.

answered Sep 24 '13 at 22:28

Matimont

111
1

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 29 '13 at 18:35

There is a firefox subreddit thread that says that the tab switch slowness is due to switching back and forth between firebug and non-firebug tabs. And a possible resolution is listed:

For me, the workaround (sort of) was to realize that the main culprits in this are the "console" and "net" tabs in Firebug (*). If you disable those tabs (only enable them when you really need them), you'll make Firebug actually quite fast.

Firefox changing tabs is slow

4 Answers4