firefox chokes 4919

Jim Strathmeyer

I've experienced two different things that might be what you're describing.

1) Firefox will appear to freeze if I've got many sites open in many windows (I don't use tabs) if one of them is slow in responding. Downloading content from other sites for the other windows appears to halt while it tries to make contact with the slow server. For example, if one site is slow, and I'm reading something else on another site and click a link in that window, nothing will happen in that second window until the first one either completes or fails due to a timeout.

2) Firefox will truly freeze (for no apparent reason), meaning that it won't repaint the window if you minimize it and re-open it, won't respond to requests to close the window, etc., after opening and closing a *lot* of browser windows (well over 100) in a single session. (I've never had that many open simultaneously...it's just when I've opened a window, done something, closed the window, opened another...many times without ever closing them all at once, thus never actually exiting the app.) The only way I've found to get around that is to peridically exit Firefox altogether and restart it, before the problem arises. Perhaps the same bug affects opening and closing too many tabs.

AFAICT, both of those happen even with sites that aren't using any Java, Javascript, or Flash.