mike, maybe natures way of telling you to slow down and enjoy the weather?

try starting without addons - if it's snappy then one of the addon updates has done a number....

I've noticed this, too, with almost exactly the same timing - was working smoothly last week then slowed down a day or two ago. I'm going to try ushere's suggestion of turning the add-ons off.

enjoy the weather?

Leslie, the air conditioner is running in overtime mode right now tring to keep my place cool.
At 7 p.m., it's 32 C. / 90 F.
Add in the humidity and it's 40 C. / 104 F.
Not a good day to be outside if you don't have to be.
To make matters worse, this is as cool as it's going to be all week :(

I tried a restart without the addons and it didn't make any difference.
I'm going to blame it on the extreme heat and stop worrying about it.

Mike

edit: thanks crocdoc. I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one experiencing this.

With 4 I used to get this and it would drive me nuts. Haven't noticed it with 5 yet. When it happened with 4, clearing the cache would usually bring things back to normal. I think what was going on was that certain scripts embedded into ads would try to execute, be blocked, and keep trying to execute over and over again. It would affect scripts in Vegas too when it happened (which is why I suspect this).

I got so fed up with Firefox's "rapid deployment strategy" (meaning release one buggy version to replace another), I went back to 3.6.18, and I may just not upgrade again during this lifetime. I am so fed up with Mozilla I could puke.

I use Chrome and I'm very happy with it. I also like the fact that my bookmarks can be set to automatically sync across all my machines and my Android phone.

My biggest problem with Chrome was that it took up 400MB on my C: drive, as compared with 3.5MB for Firefox. But Mozilla's "rapid version increment" BS has me almost as turned off. When an open source developer publicly chooses style over substance, it begins to worry me that yet another "very big deal" is in the works; i.e., "Google Firefox"?. Wait and see . . .

For those who like Firefox, but annoyed with those issues, try Pale Moon. It is optimized Firefox. I switched to this Pale Moon browser two weeks ago and very happy with it. You can read more about it here:

http://www.askvg.com/pale-moon-new-web-browser-based-on-mozilla-firefox-and-optimized-for-speed/

As I understand it, bookmarks can be synchronised to other machines and Android phones via Google Bookmarks. The Gmarks Firefox extension adds functionality to that.

I also rolled back to FF 3.6 because the Quicktime 7.6.2 plugin displays no controls in 4 or 5, and I don't want to update it because later ones aren't compatible with Vegas Pro 8. Also the width of the this forum and the size of the font is back to "normal". It was huge for me in FF 4 and 5.

Opera seems pretty interesting, especially as it's free these days, and there is a popular Android app for it. But it also shows no controls in Quicktime 7.6.2.

My first load when I fire up the PC is slow compared to IE, but afaik windows startup includes some of IE when you have that installed.

Still missing the google toolbar for FF5 - I know the "hack" for using the old one, but it does not work ok for me, so I'm waiting for a "real" one...

/Ulf

I'm starting to think that it's not Firefox but something to do with my computer.
On the advice of others here, I cleaned out my cache and temp folders.
I tried the latest versions of Google Chrome and Pale Moon and both exhibited the same behaviour as did IE 6.
I ran a full virus scan as well as malware, adware and spyware scans and nothing turned up.
I'm in no way an IT expert so any further troubleshooting suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks again.

Mike

If you have any complex scripts in Vegas like Ultimate-S or Excalibur, try running one of them when you have one of these slow downs and see if it is excruciatingly slow during that time. On my system, it has something to do with an unwanted script being run by some advertiser or other pushy entity. I see it mostly in Firefox because that is my main browser, but switching to another browser doesn't fix it.

Try running a speed test for your inbound / outbound data rate. Rarely is your computer the source of a perceivable slowdown in browsing. Even a marginal computer spends most of its time waiting on the requested internet server to respond and/or deliver data (even with a really fast connection).

I use Speakeasy all the time for this.

Also, there can be other loads on the data transfer within your local network. I had an internet slowdown issue recently and it turned out to be my internet enabled Dish Network DVR causing a big load on the bandwidth. I rebooted the Dish Network receiver and the problem cleared up.

Jim

Laurence, I have Excalibur so I'll try it when I get home tonight.

Jim, that was my first thought so I ran Speedtest (what my ISP recommends) and it tested perfectly normal.
I'm going to give them a call tonight and see if anyone else in my area is reporting this problem.

Mike

I ran TCP Optimizer on most of my Windows installations over the last few years. It fixed a few registry settings in XP that were less than ideal for broadband. Those things have probably been fixed in Windows 7, but this program claims to tend to other settings. It might be worth a shot if you're having trouble.

Mike, are you on a wireless router?
I have some homebrew throughput tests that can help.

It may be that your DNS (domain name server) is just being slow. A DNS server translates domain names (i.e. www.cnn.com) and hostnames into the corresponding numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Every time you click on a link, your browser has to consult a DNS server. Even if your raw transfer speed test is really zippy, if your ISP's DNS server is slow, it will really slow down the loading of pages just as you describe. DNS slowdowns are quite common and they tend to get resolved after a while. (My Comcast DNS server was painfully slow all day yesterday but today it's back to "normal.") Your slowdown probably has nothing whatsoever to do with your computer.

"It may be that your DNS (domain name server) is just being slow."I haven't tried this, but if your ISP's DNS service is slow, you could try Google Public DNS Might be worth a shot.

Also, if you're slow to connect to a site, you could always use the ole tracert command from the command prompt. Here I did a "tracert sonycreativesoftware.com"


The only problem with this is... you might find out which of the several hops is slow, but there's not a whole helluva lot you can do about it.

...Jerry

Mike, nothing earth shattering here, but did you try basic procedures like shutting down the computer, router and modem waiting 10 minutes and booting up the modem, waiting for all the lights to come up, then boot the router same way, and then bring up your computer? There have been lots of storms this past week and a momentary loss of power may have lost connections between some of your devices and things just need to be reset. The other gremlin in my house has been power supplies fading away enough to cause problems but not enough to be obvious. Just pulled a xerox monitor off my wife's machine that was misbehaving that has a bad power supply, and I can't count the number of Lacie poser supplies I went through before i had the revelation to unplug them when i wasn't using the HD's.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys.
For whatever reason (the gremlins went back to sleep?), things seem to be back to normal.
Yes, my fingers and toes are crossed :)
I did a defrag on my drive C as it had never been done since I got the machine over 4 years ago.
Not sure if that did anything but, as I said, Firefox is behaving itself once again.
I never did get a chance to call my ISP to see if there was a problem at their end.
Thanks once again for all the suggestions.

Mike

Ha, good I found this thread because (please don't flame this middle aged man set in his habits for this), as the above shows: I'm still using FF 3.6 for two reasons but would like your input for faster speed is always beneficial -- even if just milliseconds, eh? Ah we iz so spoiled these days....

A) I use my bookmark bar a lot and screenshots of what I've seen from reviews, etc. show the Chrome minimalist style is all the rage these days. I don't want to go to some drop-down menu when it's right there in instant-use sight. Can I still bring this back in with v.4 and 5?

B) I like the order of URL, search, bookmarks as you see above. Ditto: Can one replicate any and all of that in some way in the newer versions?

Thanks.

~ Philip

Bump. Could any of you experienced Firefoxers please take a shot at answering my two questions above? While I'd like to be up to date, I don't want to install a newer version over an older for it has in the past kind of screwed things up -- at times reverted FF to default settings, etc.Thanks.