How come? Firefox upgrade slows browsing.

May 10, 2021 Last reply: 5 years ago 4 Replies

Each time Firefox downloads one of its automatic updates, until the update is installed, browsing in Firefox comes almost to a painful standstill.



I notice a similar issue with Win10 updates, once they are downloaded and ready to install.


firefox upgrades are generally only about 10 seconds to download and 10 seconds to upgrade and restart the browser here

Those can take longer, but during the download phase it doesn't hammer anything ...

I'd imagine it slows most stuff down. Do you have an ssd in the machine, That does help but it seems to me its a bottleneck in the multi tasking or the way processor cores are utilised on Intel machines as not seen it so bad on AMD of similar spec. Its surely not a great problem to wait for the download though is it? Brian

You would look at Task Manager for some hint as to what is going on.

Sysinternals ProcMon would be another tool of interest.

The updater is an EXE in the Program Files folder of Firefox. But these things could change from one release to another.

Modern Firefox also puts a toast notice on the screen, as a further source of annoyance. The Firefox updater requests UAC elevation, and that can be a source of slowdown, if (somehow) the UAC prompt was hidden behind other items. Some of the older OSes were capable of hiding a UAC prompt.

There is a whole lot of junk involved, to make this work.

And Windows Update scans the living s*it out of the computer, even when the Settings window is not open. Windows Update is also allowed to scan the living s*it out of the machine, multiple times a day. That used to be a problem for some corporations running Windows 7, that was a complaint. It was running hourly or something. And that's before the download for the update has even started.

Paul

I don't think Harry means the time taken to do the actual download or update, but just in general terms.

For instance, I hardly ever power my main computer down, just letting it sleep overnight. I may reboot it every couple of weeks or so. However, if browsing starts to slow down to the point where it annoys me, I can always guarantee that a Firefox update has downloaded and is waiting for me to close the browser so it can action said update.

It's a repeatable situation that happens every time there's an update.

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