[thelist] Firefox / Latency / Graying out

[Bob Meetin]

There have been a few posts this past year about Firefox, possibly memory leaks, etc.  I'm just wondering about a problem which I'm encountering more and more frequently.  It used to be that if I go to a page with a lot of records, say 1000, pulled from a database, that it would take a few seconds extra to paint the page and the table. Along the way the browser might gray out momentarily, then the page is fine.  This is happening much more recently, with more websites.

Just a minute ago I had several tabs open,  inactive, the pages had loaded and all I was doing was going back and forth to read some content. As I was trying to fill out a form, the latency was horrific and Firefox pulled off a repetitive gray out.  When it happens you wait a few seconds to have a minute and when for the cursor to regain life.  To fill out the form I resorted to writing the text in a text editor, then copy/paste.  What a lovely experience.

Quitting/restarting Firefox helps but eventually it builds up.  It feels like some websites are more of a challenge than others.  Once they gain grip, you're out of luck. Occasionally after you quit Firefox it won't restart because there is a "sleeping" process running which you have to kill first.

How do you determine with problems like these whether they are 1) browser, 2) website or 3) computer? 4) other