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20050218 Friday February 18, 2005
Firefox Gotcha and Fix Computers

I recently started seeing a strange problem with Firefox: it would hang for about 20 seconds every time a new window (frame) was created. It was one of those situations where "nothing changed," as I used to hear so often in my customer support days. I only saw the problem on one of my PCs and not my Sun. Rebooting didn't help so my first suspicion was a virus or spyware.

Lots of virus checks later, I found nothing. I bit the bullet and reinstalled Firefox. Fixed! So I readded my old profile. Ooops! Problem returned. OK, go back and add things one at a time. Bookmarks, nope. Themes, nope. Prefs file, nope. But when I got to the extensions, SwitchProxy caused the hang. Strange, since I have this on all my versions (I VPN into Sun a lot, Sun uses proxies, so it's nice to easily turn proxies on and off).

To make a short story long, the problem is that SwitchProxy has a setting to check for new updates automatically. This is turned on by default, but is turned off on all of my other installations. I can only guess that the SwitchProxy web site went down and SwitchProxy doesn't nicely do its update check in the background (boo!!). Turning this feature off in the options window fixed the problem.


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February 18, 2005 01:36 PM PST Permalink | Comments [5] | del.icio.us technorati slashdot digg reddit facebook stumbleupon

Comments:

Gotta love blogs. Exact same problem, just never took the time to look into it. Thanks for the firefix! Isn't that a bit scary to see what plugins can do to Firefox?

Posted by Alexis MP on February 19, 2005 at 06:51 AM PST #

Thanks for the tip. This has been driving me nuts.

Posted by Hans Fugal on February 22, 2005 at 08:09 AM PST #

I also want to thank you for the tip, I had it tracked down to the SwitchProxy extension but didn't know the cause. Thankfully you're right near the top of "SwitchProxy problems" in Google!

Posted by Brett Engle on February 22, 2005 at 08:53 AM PST #

Glad I could help!

Posted by Kevin on February 22, 2005 at 09:00 AM PST #

Same problem over here. Not untill I totally removed firefox and reinstalled the extensions 'one by one' was it that I found out it was SwitchProxy. Oh well, it keeps you busy... and I got a clean install after all. :-)

Posted by Caspar on February 22, 2005 at 05:46 PM PST #

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