I recently disabled all of my Firefox add-ons because Firefox said that was the best way to overcome the problem I was having with page loads hanging up forever. It seemed to have helped some. I’m not sure it helped a lot.
But when I go to liveleak.com, the videos now want to load in a separate player – Quicktime, etc., and I’m asked which one to use – instead of just playing automatically on the screen in Liveleak.
How do I fix this?
You need to go back in and reenable your plugins. They likely were not slowing you down. Addons usually refers only to the extensions. Those really can slow you down.
You actually can get by only enabling the plugins you actually use. This one mentions Quicktime, so go in and turn that one on.
You’ll probably also need to turn Flash on. This is the one plugin that really can slow down page loads. To deal with that, you need an addon (extension) called Flashblock. It will replace all Flash on every page with a placeholder image, and only activate the Flash when you explicitly click on it, instead of when the page is loading.
There are a lot of other tricks to speeding up Firefox. If you can tell me your system specs (RAM, processor and speed, Operating system), and describe the behavior a little more clearly, I can probably help. That is, if Flashblock doesn’t help a lot.
One advice I will always give is to use Adblock Plus. It will remove a ton of content that slows you down. The most complicated–and therefore slowest loading–part of the web is the special codes ads use to integrate with the pages, since they aren’t from the same place.
Have 4 different computers. Have 3-5 different browsers on each computer.
On only one computer on the Firefox and Pale moon browsers I get a complete lock only if a page has a lot of displayed images from Photobucket.
Or.
A lot of images ( big ) from other sites if I try and move the mouse or work a slide bar before everything loads.
Of course it is my main computer. XP PRO.
I even went so far as to do a complete reformat and and reinstalled XP All was good for several months. Then I reached some critical mass of stuff installed on the computer ( I think ) and it is back to total lock ups. I have to do a power cut and restart to recover.
Yes, I hate to guess which threads will mess me up and switch browsers. I really like Pale moon.
Besides, I want to know what is going on and how to fix it.
Operating System System Model
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (build 2600)
Install Language: English (United States)
System Locale: English (United States) MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO.,LTD MS-7387 1.0
Enclosure Type: Desktop
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
2.20 gigahertz Intel Core2 Duo
64 kilobyte primary memory cache
2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Not hyper-threaded Board: MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO.,LTD MS-7387 1.0
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. V1.0 08/14/2007
Drives Memory Modules c,d
74.35 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
45.25 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
Optiarc DVD RW AD-7190A [Optical drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]
Generic USB CF Reader USB Device [Hard drive] – drive 2
Generic USB MS Reader USB Device [Hard drive] – drive 4
Generic USB SD Reader USB Device [Hard drive] – drive 1
Generic USB SM Reader USB Device [Hard drive] – drive 3
WDC WD740ADFD-00NLR5 [Hard drive] (74.36 GB) – drive 0, s/n WD-WMANS2585220, rev 21.07QR5, SMART Status: Healthy 1920 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory
Slot ‘DIMM0’ has 1024 MB
Slot ‘DIMM1’ has 1024 MB
Local Drive Volumes
c: (NTFS on drive 0) 74.35 GB 45.25 GB free
Network Drives
BigT, I went back and enabled the plug-ins, with the exception of a few that seemed unnecessary. And I installed Flashblock.
The videos are working fine now. I don’t see the page hangups at this moment, but for weeks now I’ve had pages get hung up and just sit in the load process forever. Often, if I hit the button to stop loading the page, then hit reload, it will open quickly.
When a page is hung up like that, I can go to IE and the same page opens immediately.
So that’s what I was trying to fix. Any ideas on what that problem is?
Windows 7 Home Premium
3.20 gigahertz Intel Core i5 650
I don’t believe it has anything to do with your configuration. One of the ad servers isn’t responding in a timely manner. This would happen no matter which browser you used, and the solution is to do exactly what you mentioned. The reason IE seems to be working better is the same as the reason that refreshing in Firefox works: it’s just an intermittent problem that clears up rather quickly.
There is one configuration option in Firefox that might work, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. There is a setting called network.http.keepalive.timeout, which you can increase. You can do so by typing about:config in your address bar, clicking the “I’ll be careful” button, and typing the full setting name above in search. You can then right click on the setting and increase the number. The old default was 300, so I’d try that instead of the current 115.
The only other solutions I know of require more extensions to use Adblock Plus or NoScript*, which can both disable the search for the advertisement code which is not completing. The problem is that NoScript will disable the JavaScript code for everything by default, which means a lot of work for the user in reenabling on appropriate sites. Furthermore, updates will sometimes add security features that will suddenly break sites that were previously working. The problem with Adblock Plus is that it will disable all ads, not just slow resolving ones.
A lot of that code is Flash, so hopefully Flashblock will be sufficient for you. But, if you need more, I’d go with Adblock Plus. You can disable it on the pages you know don’t have problems, if you have ethical problems with blocking all ads. I’ll ask around and see if there’s a filter list that would only block the slow servers.
I personally wouldn’t bother doing anything unless the problem shows up again, and happens more than, say, once a day or so. As I said in the first paragraph, just clicking stop and clicking refresh will usually resolve the problem.
*YesScript also exists, but there are other reasons I wouldn’t recommend it for this use. I’ll get into it more if someone asks. But let’s just say it’s not really that easy to use for this.
Thanks, BigT. Great information. Everything seems fine for now, so I’ll leave things alone unless it becomes a problem again.