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Comment by btrettel | Hacker News Reader

Here's one personal irritation on this subject: Programs which appear to be fully loaded, but don't allow you to do anything for a while. I'm solely a Linux user now, but I recall that Windows would do this before I stopped using Windows entirely in the late 2000s. Firefox does this pretty bad now. I typically wait a few minutes after opening Firefox before doing anything. After roughly a minute Firefox has autocomplete in the URL bar, but no websites will load until I wait another minute or so.

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> Firefox does this pretty bad now. I typically wait a few minutes after opening Firefox before doing anything. After roughly a minute Firefox has autocomplete in the URL bar, but no websites will load until I wait another minute or so.

Wow! I have maybe a dozen extensions installed, but even on my work laptop (which is not very high spec), I can use Firefox easily within 10 seconds of opening it. Do you have tons of tabs open and have it set to reopen the previous session? I'm kind of shocked to hear that it could take this long

Also the configuration matters. Core 2 Duo with 4gb RAM running Windows 10 will suffer a swapping fate that not even I would wish on my enemies

That sounds like just literal self-punishment. If you want to use Core 2 you need some super lightweight DE like Xfce or LXDE. Windows 10? Come on. You will simply have to get some newer hardware to do anything with that.

Its a self inflicted problem, nowadays you can get perfectly fine 5-7 year old computers for ~free at the recycling center.

Where is this recycling center?

Go look at ewaste companies and find out how they discard computers. Those 200 lot computer sales on eBay come from these companies and they buy old hardware for pennies on the dollar. If you get them before they make it to eBay or other distribution channels you can usually get another 20-50% off (I got a sun fire v20 this way for $200 back in the day)

What's a recycling center? What if your country doesn't have them?

That's actually my configuration at home. Don't really have any problems with it, can run Firefox and Visual Studio just fine.

Might be different if I did not have an SSD (from 2010) of course.

I don't save tabs. My laptop is from 2015, but not terrible. I use Xfce on Linux. Firefox was a fair bit slower before I upgraded from 4 GB of RAM to 12 GB.

Good lord, what have you done to your browser?

And of course they have to steal focus, sometimes several times, so you can't do something else while you wait.

This happens with Firefox on my work machine too. I use Firefox at home but Chrome at work for this reason. I just assumed something was glitching out due to some corporate group policy failure. But yeah, similar behavior: the Firefox window opens but is completely unresponsive for a minute.

That sounds odd to me. Do you have a lot of tabs or addons?

I don't save tabs and have about 10 addons. I'll try to see if any of them are the cause.

Edit: I should note that Firefox is only slow on the first opening after a cold boot. Firefox is fine after that. Might be some caching issue.

Edit 2: After a cold boot, Firefox loads quickly in safe mode. Disabling ABP did not seem to eliminate the problem. Disable NoScript seemed to help a bit. I might switch to uMatrix instead of those two and see if that helps.

If you do manage to find a solution, I'd love for you to share - I have this exact same issue.

For reference, re-installing FF doesn't seem to fix it, and I have neither NoScript nor uMatrix installed (although do have uBlock Origin).

(I've been meaning to troubleshoot it for a while, and if I manage to track down the issue, will let you know).

I have the same issue and my only active addons are procrastination guard and adblock. It happens at startup when there are no tabs, but I frequently have between 10 and 20 tabs.

Someone needs a $50 SSD.

Thanks for the recommendation. My laptop only has enough space for one drive, and I assumed that SSDs wouldn't have enough space for my needs. Glad to see that's not true at all, in fact, I can upgrade the space considerably. I'll go this route even if it doesn't fix Firefox.

That sounds like demand paging to me, try running from a RAM disk and see if it goes away.

I actually used to run Firefox from a RAM disk back in 2009 or so. I'll give it a shot again, thanks for the suggestion.

gmail is like that now.

It either loads in matter of minutes, or it displays last seen cached view... and loads in matter of minutes.

Fast, basic Gmail interface:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/?f=1

it only misses hangouts messaging, if it had that it would be perfect.

Still - the latest update to gmail was basically a downgrade from user perspective. It is slower, and looks the same and offers no new functionality.

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