Firefox 2 and 3 issues (Linpus)

Hey,

Some strange problems with firefox :

Firefox 2 AND firefox 3 :
"Ctrl + A" keyboard shortcut has wrong effect (brings cursor to beginning of current line instead of "select all")
"Ctrl + F5" keyboard shortcut does nothing, should refresh the page and reload all images.

Firefox 3 only :

Regularly becomes unresponsive for about 4 or 5 seconds.
For instance I push the keyboard down arrow or use the trackpad to scroll down on a page... the hard drive light turns on, firefox hangs for 4 or 5 seconds... hardrive light turns off, page scrolls...

Firefox 2 is the one that came with the default install, firefox 3 is the official firefox 3 installed like explained in the howto on this board.

Anyone else has the same problem ? My Linpus is in english and my keyboard layout is french. Ctrl+A works in every other application I've tried and typing "a" in firefox gives me an "a", no keyboard mapping problem apparently.

 

I have the same firefox3-issue with the hard drive light turning on and not being able to scroll for a couple of seconds. I've tried to find a solution, but I haven't found one yet. Because of this issue I decided to install Opera, although Opera comes with some issues itself as well, they are not as frustrating as the firefox3-issue.

 

Hi guys,

Try disabling FF3 cache, this will force Firefox to reload the pages to mem without consuming read/write cycles.
It did the trick for me.

cheers

 

Hmm, I've already set the cache to 0mb, but this doesn't seem to help. Is there any other option to disable the cache? thanks.

 

I'm afraid that's pretty much it. Just make sure that you do a ´Clear Now´ and restart FF.
If this doesn't work for you, try and do a top on the shell while your using Firefox to see how much it stresses your system.

cheers

 

The issue with unresponsive Firefox 3 can be resolved by disabling cache and safe browsing as described in the lower part of this longer article:

http://macles.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/ ... one-a110l/

Safe browsing uses a database on the hard drive (SSD) which is accessed quite often. Disabling this reduces the disk access.

 

Thanks for the link! This solves my problem

 

Yep, that fixed the problem for me too.
Would like to know why but oh well...

Thanks !

Still can't Ctrl A and Ctrl F5 though

 

The safe browsing database is something like a blacklist. For every website you visit, Firefox looks into the database (which is ~50MB) and checks if the site is there. This can slow things down when using an SSD.

The Xfce desktop has some keyboard shortcuts assigned, which may override the Firefox shortcuts. IIRC Ctrl-F5 is something like changing to the 5th virtual desktop (which is disabled in Linpus anyway). You can change that in the Settings menu, assuming you already activated the advanced mode. I run the German version of Linpus, so I can't tell you the exact name of the settings part. I think it must be Workspace settings or something like this.

 

@thomasd

Yeah but it used to hang several times on the very same website. And only when I scrolled down or switched between tabs or right clicked something... :-\

And you're right about Ctrl F5, the damn Xfce is taking over it... I set up three workspaces and Ctrl F1 to Ctrl F3 switch between them.
I can't find where to disable that though, not in workspace settings and not in keyboard settings either.
Ctrl A is what bothers me the most, fortunately it works in Quanta (maybe because it's a KDE app :s) but it also doesn't work in skype, pidgin and other programs.

 

Search for it, it is there. I had this settings screen open and changed some of the keybindings for desktop changing. You may be lucky and find a Ctrl-A keybinding there as well.

 

Hmmm... I have issues with Firefox 3 as well.

As described, it 'hangs' very shortly for 1 - 2 seconds after loading a new page, the drive light comes on (8 GB SSD here), so it's due to disk activity. When the light goes out, it continues. Very noticeable when you're viewing a webcomic and loading multiple pages in succession. :cry:



I tried Macles' trick of disabling the SafeBrowser caches, but that doesn't help either. Can't remember FF2 having this same issue though - is it much more of a memory hog perhaps? (512 MB RAM here)

 

And the problem isn't completely solved either in my case. It pretty much always hangs for 2 or 3 seconds when I open a new tab and the page loads... although disk cache is off and all !
It's not swap either, it never swaps...

But it was worse before I disabled the disk cache and safe browsing thingy.

Oh and the Ctrl A issue... it gets weirder... If I Ctrl A in firefox outside of a form field it works... it selects all the text and images on that page... but if I do it in a form field in firefox then it just moves the cursor back at the beginning of the line :?

 

I have found a solution for the stalling.

sudo find /var/cache -name *sqlite -delete

Reboot the AA1.

 

Thanks Macles, will try - although I'll try and back sqlite up rather than just deleting it, I think. <puzzled>

How did it improve things for you? Performance jumped right away? (In that case it'd be indicative as the problem's cause, indeed, of course.)

Regards, R

PS. Any drawbacks that you're aware of, btw?

 

After a few days of heavy firefox 3 use, I can confirm that the hanging problems disappeared after deleting the sqlite cache in /var/cache

Thanks macles

What was that cache for ? (disk cache is off, safe browsing is off... history is on but symptoms didn't come back after a few days... so it's not that :s)

 

I made a post about it explaining the situation even though i still don't really know what's going on.

http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/abou ... -acer.html

 

FYI I found that deleting the yum caches made absolutely no difference.

 

Start Firefox without saving/restoring tabs. Did you also disable safe browsing and disk cache or tweak the system in any other way? I have taken the post off for now.

 

How can i disable safe browsing and disk cache???