Mozilla + Firefox extension development

Thursday, November 04, 2004

Reasons for Firefox hanging

If you just install some extension and Firefox hangs upon loading, it could be due to some of the following reasons:
  1. A file inside the extension package is misnamed. I once gave a XUL file an .RDF extension and Firefox just hung. No error message. It sat at around 14MB of memory and showed no CPU usage.
  2. Something is wrong with the extension's install.rdf file or the content\contents.rdf file. Maybe the URI of the extension is not parsed properly (see another topic on that).
Well, what can you do? You can delete Firefox's profile on your machine (if you don't miss your usage data) by killing the Firefox subdirectory in:
C:\Documents and Settings\{your user id}\Application Data\Mozilla
if you're using Windows. Perhaps there's something more specific in that directory to kill, but I haven't investigated. Note that reinstalling Firefox doesn't help.

posted by David Huynh at 1:18 PM

4 Comments:

  • Here's one SOLUTION:

    I have been using Firefox since it first released. Recently I experienced FF hanging upon startup while consuming little to no CPU.
    This was extremely frustrating.

    The Windows XP Event Viewer frequently showed these errors shortly after each start of FF:

    Category (101) Event 1002
    Hanging application , version 0.0.0.0, hang module hungapp, version 0.0.0.0, hang address 0x00000000.

    After Googling on this for a while, I learned when others had seen similar problems , they associated it with whether they were connected to the network or not. Sure enough, everytime FF hung, all I had to do was pull out my network cable and wallah! FF quickly timed out and resume operation.

    I fired up Etherreal to see what was going on. It turns out while FF is in it's hung state, it is bombarding the network with query request packets to 'jgillick.nettripper.com'

    This is the same URL that was causing my BandwidthMeter extension for FF to hang several months back.

    THE ANSWER: My FF nows starts as smooth as silk, since I made the following edit to my system hosts file.

    Open up this file
    write.exe C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

    and add the following line ...

    127.0.0.1 localhost jgillick.nettripper.com


    Problem solved!

    Ken Banks

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 7:01 AM  

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    By Blogger The Computer Guys, at 1:47 AM  

  • Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you!
    I have a window xp home helpwindow xp home help site/blog. It pretty much covers window xp home help Problems with your Windows Xp Computing !
    Come and check it out if you get time :-)

    By Blogger The Computer Guys, at 7:49 PM  

  • Greetings from North Cack-A-Lacky! I enjoyed your thoughts, although I give Firefox even a little more credit than you do, I think ;) See what I mean here: firefox tweak

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10:15 PM  

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