I am using Firefox 134.02 (64 Bit). Often, on the SDMB but not other sites, I cannot click on a link or other thing I should be able to click on, when I am typing a post (it’s happening right now) the cursor stops moving forward and then jumps and prints out all the words I typed while it was frozen.
Restarting the laptop does not help.
As this is a technical question about the site, I’ve moved it to site feedback. ATMB is for stuff the management of this board controls.
Just as an anecdote, I’ve been having minor problems with this site on Chrome, where a page will load, and I’ll attempt to mouse scroll down and the upper half of the page will freeze, while the bottom half scrolls normally, which normally self corrects within a matter of seconds. I had actually assumed it was a problem due to being forced to uBlock Origin Lite, since it started happening about the same time, but @DocCathode’s post made me realize I hadn’t seen it happen elsewhere. It is an intermittent problem though, probably about 1/10 tabs or less. And I do restart daily.
Windows 11, Chrome 134.0.6998.178 (Official Build) (64-bit), Dark Theme
Can you share a bit more detail about your computer? If you copy and paste the “unique URL” from this site, it’s easier to see: https://www.whatismybrowser.com/
Or at least what kind of computer, how old is it, operating system, hardware specs if you know, etc.?
Are you using any sort of adblocker or other extensions?
That is the unique URL.
I’ve noticed the SDMB freezing on my iPhone now and then in recent days. Maybe once or twice per day.
The symptoms are somewhat different than what DocCathode and ParallelLines are reporting. All I see is one page very slowly loading – really, a hung page. I normally close the tab and go back into the SDMB. Doing this clears up the problem and the SDMB performs just fine (until the next hung page).
I frequently browse the SDMB from a Win 11 laptop (Dell Inspiron 14 5440, released March 2023, new to me January 2025), as well, but have NOT noticed any hung pages on the laptop. I use Chrome on the laptop as ParallelLines does, but a newer build - Version 135.0.7049.41 (Official Build) (64-bit). Also Dark Theme.
(To all of you) Are you using any sort of adblocker? Which one?
I had a tech geek friend help me set up this laptop. He did install some kind of ad blocker. I have no idea what.
No ad blocker that I’m aware of. Safari IIRC has a built-in pop up blocker, though — new tabs won’t auto-open.
If you type the URL about:addons (no HTTP or anything, just literally those two words separated by a colon) into the Firefox address bar, you should see a list of extensions there. Look for something like “Adblock Plus” or “uBlock” or such in the “Enabled” list.
Just trying to rule out possibilities. Sometimes third-party ads and trackers can significantly slow down a webpage and occasionally cause stalling. It doesn’t look like the SDMB’s ads are even working anymore (nothing shows up for me even without an ad blocker), but there are still some other requests that an adblocker could help limit, improving performance somewhat.
Not a surefire fix, just one thing to look into.
You’re also on an older computer (thanks for the detailed specs!), so it may be just struggling to keep up with Discourse’s “infinite scroll” loading system. Does the same thing happen on other Discourse-based sites, like their own forum? https://meta.discourse.org/
I’m using chrome on an HP desktop, HP laptop, and an eye phone 
and no problems with any. (Unless Im in an area with $hitty hot-spot wifi)
Thanks! I have Ad Block Plus. I am pretty sure I used that same program on my old laptop.
The only other message board I belong does not seem to be Discourse based. But, old as this laptop is my last one was much older and never had this problem.
I don’t know if it will fix this specific problem, but I’d suggest uninstalling that and switching to uBlock Origin instead; it is faster and blocks more, especially if you go into its configuration afterward and enable all the various tracking, privacy, and annoyance prevention filters. It should generally speed up websites by drastically reducing the unnecessary stuff they load and show you.
AdBlock Plus was sold to an advertising company a while ago and it serves its own ads now.
I mean, if you go to that other Discourse forum and browse around (or try to post something), do you run into the same issue there?
And your older computer… you mean it worked fine with the current Discourse-based SDMB too, or only when we were on the older forum software?
Stalls like that can also just be caused by general computer slowdowns, like if you’re running low on RAM and it has to swap to the hard drive (which you can prevent by quitting all other unused tabs and applications and not leaving them open in the background), or if the laptop is overheating (it would feel warm to the touch, and you can help prevent it with a laptop cooling pad or just some compressed air in the fan slots), or you have some malware/old antivirus (which is similar to malware)/etc. running in the background.
It can also be a device driver issue, something causing a temporary stall in the operating system that it has to immediately respond to, queuing up your text until it can process again. Making sure you’ve applied all the outstanding Windows Updates can help with that.
Firefox in particular (vs Chromium-based browsers like Chrome or Edge) can especially be prone to intermittent performance problems with certain websites — it is maintained by a nonprofit that can’t quite keep up with all the latest advancements that Google forces into the web “standards”. On a fast enough computer it won’t matter, but on slower machines, it’s possible particularly heavy sites (and I’d count Discourse among that) to experience slowdowns.
I recently switched from Chrome to Firefox and things are generally slower and buggier for me too, although I’m at least able to type a whole post here (on a fast computer) without issue…
Sorry I don’t have a specific answer for ya. Just things to try.
It worked fine with Discourse. I only got this laptop (Refurbished Best Buy) in February.
It should come with some warranty, right? Can you take it to Geek Squad for help and ask them to run a malware scan, etc.?
There are ways to more deeply diagnose a situation like this (browser inspector, Windows task manager and events log, etc.) but none of those are easy to use or describe over a forum post.
Fundamentally you can either try to throw more computer at it (expensive), decrease your resource usage (annoying but adblock and limiting open tabs/apps can help), or try to find the actual underlying culprit (harder, usually requires in-person diagnosis). Using another browser as a test might help isolate the problem to see if it’s an issue with Firefox on your machine or something else.
I did some surfing on the Discourse message board you linked to. I didn’t have any problems. What ever it is seems to be SDMB specific.
For the record- I am not completely computer illiterate. I forget exactly when the standard Windows lay out became a nightmare for me. A friend recommended Classic Shell. After I installed that on my old laptop, I could handle everything else. When I got this laptop, I badly needed Classic Shell. I tried downloading and installing that before doing anything else. I ended up with a bunch of malware. Mcafee would repeatedly tell me exactly what malware I had. This included a keylogger. When I tried using Mcafee to actually get rid of the malware, it told me that I needed to log into their site and buy a subscription to do that. I hadn’t installed any of the usual programs I use to eliminate malware. I had not installed Firefox or any of the add ons that prevent malware from getting onto my laptop. I asked people what to do. Some said I should log in to some website or another to fix the problem. This was after I told them about the key logger. One friend said I should reformat the hard drive and re install Windows. I said that I had considered that. But the laptop had not come with any copy of Windows to re install. He said he had a copy and I should come over. I repaid him with- a Mr T car air freshener, A-Team shrinky dinks, a Mario cap and pizza. He is one of the very few people I trust to stay out of my files and not to install any kind of spyware of their own on my laptop.
I still need an external Blu Ray DVD drive and an external back up drive for this machine.
I believe you. If you wanted to, you can open the network inspector (CTRL-SHIFT-E) and watch it while you try to edit a post here and see if it’s doing anything in particular when the freezes happen. The console (CTRL-SHIFT-K) can also give clues sometimes, but can be overwhelming if you don’t understand the errors (many of them are just false positives).
But neither of those will help if it’s a computer, rather than a Firefox, problem.
Sorry, wasn’t trying to imply anything! Those are the same troubleshooting steps I would use myself (and have used) to resolve similar issues in the past.
In one case, for me, it was a mouse driver causing the stalling — it was polling too frequently and oversaturating the USB bus or something, can’t remember exactly. In another case, a display card issue was causing screen redraw/refresh issues, but only on certain browsers with certain sites. The darndest things can cause mysterious issues like that =/
Cryptic problems like that, and yes, the annoying bloated new interfaces, led to me eventually giving up Windows altogether, and I’m much happier now…
OK, so did your friend reinstall any sort of antivirus on it? If you’re still using McAfee, that in and of itself can be malware-like and cause slowdowns as it’s scanning stuff. McAfee and Norton are especially bad in that regard. The built-in Windows Defender (or whatever it’s called these days) should be good enough and not as much of a resource hog.
If you keep the task manager open in the background (but maybe delay the refresh interval to several seconds), you might be able to tell which process is causing a sudden spike when the system halts like that.
The Event Viewer is the official source for system-level errors: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/inside/event-viewer
If any of that is nonsensical, maybe your friend can help again? Got a spare Luigi cap lying around? 
(double checks)
Ah good I didn’t forget to include that in my post (relief!), yes, I switched at around the same time I saw the errors to uBlock Origin Lite, which was and still is my first guess as to something that’s not playing well with others. Just that the particular issue doesn’t seem to happen on other sites, but that’s not evidence either way.
I seriously doubt it’s a hardware issue (it’s happening on my moderately specced gaming rig) but I’ll put additional info in a dropdown just in case it’s helpful for anyone researching on the Discourse side, slightly pruned for privacy.
| OS Name | Microsoft Windows 11 Home |
|---|---|
| Version | 10.0.26100 Build 26100 |
| Processor | 11th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i5-11400F @ 2.60GHz, 2592 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s) |
| — | — |
| BIOS Version/Date | American Megatrends International, LLC. P1.90, 10/5/2021 |
| SMBIOS Version | 3.3 |
| Embedded Controller Version | 255.255 |
| BIOS Mode | UEFI |
| BaseBoard Manufacturer | ASRock |
| BaseBoard Product | B560M-C |
| Installed Physical Memory (RAM) | 32.0 GB |
| — | — |
| Total Physical Memory | 31.9 GB |
| Available Physical Memory | 22.6 GB |
| Total Virtual Memory | 33.9 GB |
| Available Virtual Memory | 22.1 GB |
| Page File Space | 2.00 GB |
| Page File | C:\pagefile.sys |
| Kernel DMA Protection | On |
Your particular issue sounds more like a graphics issue, but I can’t say for sure. Does it happen for you on the meta.discourse.org site?
Random possibilities:
You can try disabling hardware acceleration:
Go to the URL chrome://settings/system and turn OFF “Use graphics acceleration when available”. (You can easily turn it back on if it doesn’t help.)
You can also try the opposite of that, forcing hardware acceleration, by going to chrome://flags/#ignore-gpu-blocklist and enabling that (but don’t use this together with the previous option; try the above one first, then if it doesn’t do anything, switch that back to the default and enable this… and if it still doesn’t work, reset both to their defaults since the problem lies elsewhere).
If your gaming rig is a home-built desktop, it might also be worth making sure Windows and Chrome are on a SSD (if you still had a mechanical hard drive in there). With that much RAM, you can also probably turn off the pagefile altogether (though I really doubt that’s the issue here).
Do you have a dual-graphics card setup (integrated and a separate discrete Nvidia/AMD one?) If you completely disable the integrated one (in the BIOS/UEFI, usually) and only use the discrete one, that can help prevent weird display issues like that can often result from the (normally seamless, but sometimes wonky) dynamic switching between the two.
If there’s any sort of software-based dynamic contrast going on (certain versions of the Intel display driver will have that), that can sometimes bug out on certain levels of gray/white/black on-screen and cause strangeness. Disable that too. (If the dynamic contrast is hardware in your monitor, it should be fine).
Not so far (scrolling on the main discourse site), but again, it’s intermittent to the point of frustration, no more than 1/10 times at most. I again was eyeballing uBlock, or possibly Chrome mishandling memory since I tend to have a lot of tabs open, even more these days.
My gaming laptop does use both the integrated and discrete video cards, but the desktop is set to only use the AMD Radeon RX 6600, and I haven’t yet noticed the issue on the laptop, but I don’t use it all that much. I’ll do some more digging. Again, as many such things, it’s the difficulty in getting the problem to happen consistently that makes the troubleshooting so vague.