Recently I've noticed that every once in a while, my laptop's FF would occasionally freeze when I open a new page, only to completely recover after 10 seconds. Before it unfreezes the application behaves just like any other application which has crashed: the window is irresponsive and turned white; clicking "X" produces the "<Application> is not responding" windows error.

It occurs infrequently (perhaps once every few hours), but I am perplexed as to why it does this in the first place. The problem seems to exist in all versions of firefox on my laptop (3.6 - Aurora 8.0a2). However, my desktop computer, with the exact same versions of FF installed, never exhibits this behavior. Virus scans with several tools yielded no results. Is this due to slow disk I/O? My laptop's hardware specs are significantly above that of my desktop computer, except for the HDD. Because of the generic nature of this error, searching for this specific problem proved to be all but impossible via conventional means, so if a fellow SENer knows the reason, please do divulge it.

[I don't believe providing specifications is necessary, but if requested I can post them again, although I do not see how that would help.]

EDIT> Oh, I should mention this: Chrome does the exact same thing, except instead of recovering, it crashes the last tab or few tabs I had open. IE 9, upon freezing, completely crashes. This has led me to believe that this isn't a browser-specific problem, but an issue with my computer that is somehow affecting all the browsers I have installed.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 2 2011, 6:21 am by Aristocrat.

I'd reinstall windows. Assuming you've got XP on the laptop.

Win7.

Firefox does this to me all the time. I'm not sure of the exact cause, but I've pinned it down to youtube and flash. I haven't tried any other browsers, though. I just assume youtube's horrible scripting/flash's ugly flashness does dumb things to firefox's memory when it exceeds 1.2-1.4gb or so. That's when it starts to really cop a tude on my end.

Reinstalling windows seems like a waste.

Do you have any common plugins/add-ons that you use for Firefox and Chrome?

When it happens, check the memory usage. It could be a memory leak. I used to have an add-on that leaked like no other, and my Firefox would take up 4gb of memory.

Firefox's memory leaks have been fixed since Aurora 7.0a2 (now the Beta version); I don't think that is the cause, especially since it could happen with only one tab open that has no active content.

makes me think of malware

Plugins, not the browser itself. The browser itself is unrelated to the other browsers.

MSS, Malwarebytes, Avira, and Spybot all found nothing (the latter three were run from a boot CD). I'm going to try this on a clean XP VM and see if it happens.

@Roy: It happens even if all I am doing is going through quotes on Bash, so I don't think it's because plugins are causing issues. I believe Firefox uses a separate process (plugin-containers.exe) to isolate plugin crashes/errors from the browser, and therefore any plugin problems wouldn't choke FF itself.

A web browser should never need 1.2-1.4 gbs of memory unless you've got literally hundreds of pages open. So I wouldn't really blame such crashes on Youtube being coded badly...

Hundreds of tabs is right. Regardless of memory, youtube is always the root of any issues I ever have.

Did you try looking through installed plugins for all browsers anyway?

I don't know if FireFox does it, but Chrome has a task manager that will show you what processes/plugins are using memory and CPU.

Disabled all plugins and freezes still happen. The freeze seems to be independent of what is open, and it will occasionally freeze even if I do not interact with the browser and no active content is running.

Since this happens to all the browsers, I think there's something fishy about your network connection (bad NAT? bad DNS?) that is putting the browsers in a tizz.

Testing with a separate computer would help indicate whether it is a generic network problem or not. If it doesn't happen on other computers, then I'd suspect the network stack on your laptop itself.

As far as I know, modern browsers do not freeze from network issues external to the computer.

The same thing happens when I run the browsers inside a virtual machine. However, since virtual machines use the same hardware as the host OS, we cannot rule out hardware problems as the root cause.

This problem persists when the computer is connected to various different networks.

So it's either a hardware problem or a driver / network protocol problem with your host computer.

This started happening to me, too. I was good for a long time until a week or two ago. Not sure what changed on my computer, though.

This happened a lot when I was rendering videos to file in the background. Probably has something to do with disk access interrupts...