Is your Firefox freezing up when switching between tabs or when a tab is loading up with data? Mine had been...
I followed Firefox through several releases hoping this problem will be taken care of, but it's been quite a while and there are been no solution yet
I was finally fed up and for a few weeks I switched to Chrome. However, I find that Chrome is yet some way to go before it can hit primetime -- particularly because it doesn't allow me to stop the dancing gif images with the ESC key - a feature I so liberally used in other browsers
So I come back to Mozilla in the hope that their issue with single tabs freezing up the whole browser would have been fixed. However, as serious as this issue is, there has been no fix as of my current version (18.0.2)
So finally after scrounging the web for a solution I hit upon the below steps, which resolves the problem
1. In a blank tab, go to about:config
2. Promise to be careful (if it asks you)
3. find the entry "browser.newtabpage.enabled"
4. This entry is True by default. Double-click it so it toggles to False
5. find the entry "browser.tabs.animate"
6. This entry is also True by default. Double-click it so it toggles to False
7. Restart the browser
What this does is to avoid taking the snapshot of the tabs to display when opening the browser for the first time and/or on new tabs. Firefox chooses the unfortunate moment when you change tabs, to do this work, and as a result of this you don't get to see the newly created tab immediately. Making the two changes got me back my Firefox of yore. Me happy!
