So you’ve upgraded to to Firefox 3.0. You perhaps did this by installing over Firefox 2 and once all was said and done Firefox 3.0 ran slower than death itself using too much CPU and way too much memory–What happened?
Sounds like you may have a corrupted profile which happens once in awhile especially if you upgraded over an older version of Firefox. This doesn’t happen often but when it does it can sour the affected user on what should be an excellent upgrade.
Note: This is not always the case when Firefox 3.0 is choking at the gate after an upgrade so it’s always a good thing to start Firefox in “Safe Mode” and making sure you set it to disable all your extensions via the Safe Mode start up dialog box. If you’ve never done this before, look in your “Start menu” under “Mozilla Firefox” and you’ll find it there. If the problems disappear when running in Safe Mode then one or more of your extensions are at fault.
So what causes this to occur? Well, there are many things that could go wrong when an upgrade is run over any previous version of software but in regards to Firefox 3.0, the upgrade includes some rather major conversions of all the usual background operations that the user never notices–until things go bad that is. Suffice it to say that you could name reasons all day and probably not touch on all the possible things that could go wrong during an upgrade.
So how do you fix it? Fairly easy actually and although it can be a bit time consuming it’s definitely worth the time and effort since Firefox 3.0 is an excellent (and safe) browser. Realize right off that you’ll end up reinstalling your extensions when you do this but for those that stuff Firefox with 30 to 50 extensions, this will give you a chance to weed out some of those rarely used ones which are always hanging around using up resources you might otherwise make better use of.
Backup your bookmarks using the “Import and Backup” feature in “Organize Bookmarks”. I suggest doing a “Backup” which is a .json file, the database file in the case of Firefox 3, as well as “Exporting” the older static “bookmarks.html” file just in case or if you’ve already reverted to Firefox 2. Once that’s done, completely uninstall Firefox.
Another note: The following applies to Windows users only. Mac and Linux users would know a heck of a lot better than me where to find their default Firefox profiles. Sorry about that.
At this point I would recommend deleting your existing profile manually just to make sure. You should find it in one or both of the following paths on your computer. Just delete the “xxxxxxx.default” folder (the “xxxxxxx” will be a simple combination of letters and numbers).
“C:\Documents and Settings\[account name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxx.default”
and
“C:\Documents and Settings\[account name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxx.default”
Now you’re ready to install a fresh copy of Firefox 3.0. Once that’s complete and using “Organize Bookmarks”, either “Restore” the “.json” file you previously backed up or if you’re concerned about restoring a possibly corrupt database, use the “Import” feature import the “bookmarks.html” file you exported.
With the exception of reinstalling your extensions, you’re done. I would suggest however that you run Firefox through it’s paces online to see if things have improved any (they should have) before you start adding those extensions. I also strongly recommend reading this post about disabling “browser.cache.memory.enable” if you find that loading a new tab in the foreground slows things to a crawl. Once you’re satisfied with Firefox’s performance go ahead and install your extensions but check after every two or three to make sure one or more of them aren’t causing any problems.
Hope this helps some of you folks who are experiencing problems after upgrading to Firefox 3.0. I’ll be writing a new article on creating and using separate profiles that enables you to have several different flavors of Firefox in one install. Stay tuned.
Tags: Firefox, Firefox 3, Firefox high CPU, Firefox high memory