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PFF hangs a lot.

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Gabina
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PFF hangs a lot.

I don't have that problem with the non-portable Firefox. And I don't remember it happening when I first got Portable. Maybe it was a different version then. But now...sheesh.

I'll start to type a password and after three letters nothing shows up. I wait about 5-10 seconds and I can type again. Or I pull down a menu and wait...until it lets up and drops the menu. I can't even click anything during the hangs. The buttons won't highlight as the mouse goes over.

It started out being just an occasional hang but now it's really frequent. And annoying. I was trying to get out of the office one day. I just wanted to see if my post to a group had posted before I left. All I had to do was refresh the page, scroll down, and then scroll back up to log out. It hung after each little step. I refreshed. Then I had to wait to scroll. Then I had to wait to scroll back up. I had to wait before I could hit the link to sign off. Then I had to wait to hit the X to close the program.

I looked in Known Issues and didn't see anything about this hanging. Anyone else experience this? Anyone got a fix?

--Gabina

John T. Haller
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Search around a bit

I can guarantee you it's:
1. An extension (anything that saves sessions or has crash recovery is a no no... Tab Mix Plus, etc)

or

2. A slow device (just because it says USB 2.0 High Speed means absolutely nothing)

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Gabina
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New thumb drive....

The problem eventually just cleared up on the old thumb drive. Until the drive completely died. Then it wasn't an issue with that one anymore.

However, the new one has started to do the same thing. More and more. I just installed PortableFirefox 2 to try and alleviate the problem. There are no add-ons but the DOM inspector. I read that the modifications were made so that it wouldn't write to the drive as often but sheesh, it's still happening so many annoying times. Almost every link I try to click, at least once in any form I try to fill, sometimes when I just want to scroll.

I can see the little light on the drive flash for 5 or more seconds. Dozens of times per day.

Anyone know how I can modify or change Firefox to really do that less often?

My drive, BTW, is a PNY Attache 1GB. Computer OS is WinXP.

Thanks.

--Gabrielle

--Gabrielle

suirauqa
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slew of problems in FFP!

Gabina,
I could not agree more. I have a 4GB PQI flash drive, and I started noticing the same thing, even when I am running in the safe mode (which is where I am writing this from), i.e. no add-ons! Even just typing this reply became so annoying because of the inordinate slowness of the browser! I can't understand why this is happening (I mean, the actual drive's speed does not seem to be an issue), because all the other portable apps (I have OpenOffice, Miranda IM, GIMP and VLC - all portable) that I have on the same drive seem to work just fine!

I also lost all my extensions when I started up FFP in the normal mode. The extensions are there in the Data > profile folder, but none of them are being recognized by FFP when it starts up; as a result I am, in any case, getting a safe mode like browser experience!

Most of the times today, when I was testing this app, after clicking on FirefoxPortable.exe and getting the splash screen, nothing would happen, i.e. the browser interface would not show up at all, though in the task manager I could see FF running. I had to kill the running instances before I could try loading it again. Once it took more than 3 minutes for the UI to show up. I believe others in this forum have also noted the same thing.

Despite John Haller's extremely laudable and heroic effort, perhaps Firefox is not built for the desired portability, because as he mentions somewhere, FFP is just a wrapper around the base FF build with some profile changes.

I would probably try going back to FFP consistent with FF1.5.07, which had seemed a bit more stable then.

suirauqa
_____________________________________
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (published by Benjamin Franklin).

_____________________________________
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (published by Benjami

Ryan McCue
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Er

perhaps Firefox is not built for the desired portability
Firefox is almost portable anyway.
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Ryan McCue
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"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

John T. Haller
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Is it 2.0?

If so, it's probably the session saver that's hurting you.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Ryan McCue
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Side-note:

Are you going to disable this in the final (is that what you are working with Mozilla about?)?
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Ryan McCue
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the kind of people who didn't need people.
(Maskerade)

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

Gabina
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PFF hanging

(Had to wait nearly 10 seconds for the word "hanging" to appear in that form after I typed it. Yes, that little flashing light on the drive....)

If it's Session Saver (which is a great idea but one I can do without), how do I get rid of it?

This is almost enough to make me want to get rid of PortableFirefox (don't have any trouble with the desktop version) but I don't know if there are any other portable browsers out there and I like having my history, bookmarks, etc, leave with me when I take my drive out of my office computer.

Thanks

--Gabrielle

--Gabrielle

John T. Haller
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Forums

It's discussed in the forums in the 2.0 RC3 topic, which is where all issues related to 2.0 is discussed. Note that there is No final version of 2.0 released yet.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Gabina
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Honestly tried....

To find the 2.0 RC3 thread. I even did the search for that and the long Firefox Portable 2.0 RC3. I found the "story" but the forum topics that came up were not helpful. Can you give me a link? I'll happily go there.

--Gabrielle
Yes, I'm new to the boards and to customizing Firefox beyond the Options window.

--Gabrielle

suirauqa
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disabling sessionsaver

Gabrielle (sorry for calling you Gabina earlier!),
I don't know how to disable the new session saver feature in FF 2.0 (I also could not find the relevant article), but I can suggest a workaround. You can search for an extension called the Tab Mix Plus; current version is at 0.3.5, I believe (even if you don't need it for the sessionsaver purpose, it is a nifty little extension to have, very useful for customizing your tab browsing experience). Install that.

The Tab Mix Plus extension, which has been around since before FF 2.0, has its own session recovery feature, which never gave me these troubles and was very useful in crash recovery. When you install that, it asks you or gives you an option to use either FF 2.0's own recovery feature, or its built-in one. If you don't care about the session recovery, you may uncheck this option in Tab Mix Plus, but the bottomline is that it allows you to disable FF 2.0's own session saver also.

Hope this helps. I am going to do this and see if it helps with this current problem.

suirauqa
_____________________________________
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (published by Benjamin Franklin).

_____________________________________
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (published by Benjami

yehoni
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Won't work

Tab Mix Plus uses it's own settings to enable or disable its own session saver. They are separate from the built in session saver in FF2. When I first installed FF2 on my computer, one of the session managers kept getting confused, because the other one had already restored the session.

On the other hand, I'd still recommend TMP. It's a great extension that allows you to make every change to your tabbed browsing preferences I've ever come across, including where the close tab button is. I like the old format, with just one close button in the corner, and I added another that only appears when the mouse is hovering over a tab, not the new format of FF2, where it's on every tab. TMP let me make all of those changes.

As for disabling the built in session manager, etc. for FF2, here it is.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2536472#2536472

4th post on the page has links to descriptions on how to disable session saving and undo close tabs. Worked perfectly on my flash drive. Tabs open smoothly, extra drive activity gone.

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