I think I first noticed it in 3.0.10. It was in 3.0.11 for sure and it's in 3.5 as well.
The most common thing is I will be typing and the text will stop appearing on screen. I can keep typing, and after a few seconds, it will all spill out at once. It does this regularly, sometimes in every sentence I type.
Scrolling is similar, it's like it completely stops responding and I've got to wait for it to catch up. Sometimes it just goes completely unresponsive, and won't do anything until it's done doing whatever it is it's doing.
It's almost as if I'm suggesting to a remote user what to do and they're actually doing it. Sort of.
I'm using a USB 2.0 port, same one as ever, and a 16GB Corsair Flash Voyager drive. But I also have Portable Firefox on an external hard drive at home (not portable - 7200RPM) and it does this as well. I haven't used a locally installed Firefox in months.
Cache and anti-phishing filters are both disabled, too.
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It sounds like it might be something to do with the USB ports themselves, or the device drivers. Typically when that happens it's because the drive is busy reading/writing already and has to finish its' current process before it can continue. I used to have that problem all the time on slower flash drives, and even with my external drive that works fine on my home computer has issues on other PCs that have slower or messed up USB ports.
To me this happends also on local installation, both FF2 and FF3 and also on TBP.
It must be something common to mozilla things. Yes I first noticed on FF portable, but then on TB portable sometimes same thing and on the workshop pc with FF3.5 local install the same.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
It also happens in the local (installed) version...
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report
FF 3 and 3.5 is much much slower (lags and unresponsive) than previous versions. FF 3.x is keeping my USB stick busy (led flashing) even when i am not doing any browsing. I am sticking with FF 2, it is faster.
How would I check that? Or would I? I ran the test (HDtune) myself on this very computer, same port I always plug it into, and got performance comparable to my 4GB Corsair Readout, which, when used on the same computer on the same USB port never had the problem (albeit not with Firefox 3.5).
Fx 3.0.x and 3.5 have features that Fx 2 doesn't that might be to blame in your case, namely the anti-phishing features. I've disabled them, and if you hadn't when you had either, I recommend you give them another shot, disable those features, and see what you get out of it. Change the targeted install directory to FirefoxPortable3; it won't interfere with your Fx 2.x Portable. Then copy the data folder over so your profile exists in both. Disable the anti-phishing and the cache, restart Firefox Portable and see if that doesn't speed it up. Didn't work for me (possibly due to other things) but might help you.
I only generally prefer Firefox so emphatically over other browsers because of the ad blocking, but 90% of my time browsing at work is on sites with ads by Google, the text-based ones that don't bother me anyway. So I might just take Chrome Portable for a spin next week. (Can't give up Firefox at home, though, I've seen some of the sites I visit there sans Adblock Plus, and... it ain't pretty.)
Personally, I don't know what you're talking about
I found Firefox 3 slower than Firefox 2 (until I disabled the anti-phishing filter and the cache, after which it was faster than Firefox 2 with cache off), but Firefox 3.5 considerably faster and more responsive than both.
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That's correct for technical reasons, too. Firefox 2 used flat files to store data and didn't update them too frequently, so it worked well on flash drives. Firefox 3 switched to SQLite databases for bookmarks, cookies and history and wrote to them all the time (and whenever you write to a flash drive, it stalls everything else including reads, usually), so performance went way down. Firefox 3.5 made changes to specifically address this (and that we worked with them on) and save up writes and then sync them in batches, thus speeding up Firefox Portable.
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