The Computer Vet Weblog

I love Mozilla, and I’ve been using it for the longest time now. But there’s this one little bug that never seems to get squashed, and it’s starting to make me think of moving to FireFox. During the day I’m always minimizing Mozilla and going off to do something else, like read e-mail or work on some other files or whatever. So Mozilla will be sitting idly in the background with its six or eight tabs open, just waiting for me. But then when I switch back to it, it will hang for a bit before I can use it. Sometimes it’s ten seconds, or twenty, or even thirty or forty seconds. And during this time the disk is churning away, Mozilla is locked up, sometimes the browser is only half-drawn on the screen, or only the title bar will appear, leaving whatever window I was looking at before in the background. And slowly Mozilla will draw itself, and the buttons will appear, and the tabs will show up, and the site I was reading will come into view. And then it’s another ten or twenty seconds before I can click on a link and switch tabs. And after that, once the browser has “woken up”, it runs fine. Zippy and responsive, just like it should be.

So what makes Mozilla hibernate like that? No other program I have takes so long to activate after sitting in the background. It is seriously faster to close Mozilla when I’m not using it, then reopen it and let it go through its initialization than it is just to switch to it on the taskbar. But if I close it every time, I lose all the tabs I was working on. And this isn’t just happening on one computer. This is at work and at home. They both act in the exact same way. I’ve tried upgrading to all the new versions, and I grab nightly builds every now and then, but this problem never goes away. Is it a Mozilla problem? Is my 370MB pagefile too small? Is there something else I’m not considering? It’s only one problem in an otherwise perfect browser, but if I just want to pull up Google really fast, and have to wait 45 seconds before I can do anything, it’s a real nuisance.

So I’m writing this in FireFox, and we’ll see how it goes.