Oh BOY does this piss me off...

[Eireann]

Firefox is having issues. When I have more than one window open, it switches from one window to another, independently of what I do. Today, I kept getting a pop-up window telling me that Shockwave is busy, or has stopped responding. Nothing wanted to load. All online programs just sat there and stared at me.

I am well and really and truly pissed off by this. I've been using IE to search for the problem, but nothing much has happened yet. Any advice?

[csquared]

Which Firefox you running? 20.0.1?

[Eireann]

I don't know. The latest, I guess. It seems that Firefox just doesn't have what it takes anymore. Whenever it's open, that stupid little window pops up telling me about the flash plugin.

[Chanlin]

My first thought on the flash plugin popup is that your flash plugin was disabled. Firefox will sometimes disable out of date or vulnerable plugins after Firefox updates.

You can check your plugins by going to the Firefox > Add Ons menu then Click on Plugins and make sure Shockwave flash is enabled. (You can also get to this menu if you push Ctrl + Shift + A assuming you are using windows) - If it is enabled you will see the buttons Options and Disable on Shockwave Flash, otherwise you will see Options and Enable. Disabled plugins will also be grayed out and appear at the bottom of the plugins list.

As far as the window switching that behavior seems odd, I've never had Firefox do that to me so I don't even have a guess, it is possible it may be related to plugins, but I can't say with 100% certainty.

[Eireann]

It's enabled; I just checked. I really don't know what the problem is, here.

[Chanlin]

I would start with updating your extensions and plug ins. The issue is most likely with a specific plugin, extension, or website (I know I just named everything that can potentially cause a problem in firefox all at once ). A few things to check. Is the issue only happening when you have multiple tabs/windows open? Is it a specific site you visit that the problem begins occurring? Do you have any website specific tool bars/extensions/helpers?

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/ - This will check all of your plugins at once and tell you which ones are out of date/no longer supported etc.

You might also run a malware scan and see if that is the issue. If you don't find anything with these steps there are two ways I can think to find/resolve the issue.

1: Disable everything (extensions, plugins etc) Then run as normal and re-enable them one at a time until the problem crops back up. Then you will have your culprit. - Will be a time consuming process, but at least you will find the issue. Being that you are getting shockwave flash popups I would start with that one.

2: Nuke Firefox and start over. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...-most-problems -- This wonderful link describes how to reset it and what it resets and what you will need to reinstall afterward.

[Eireann]

I've downgraded to Flash Player 10.3, and so far, so good. Man, what a hassle!

[csquared]

I found a couple of post that said the older versions would do that, 17.X I think. To find out your version, click Help - About Firefox.

[Eireann]

Everything's still running well with the older version. As I said to someone recently, "It wasn't broken, so they fixed it."

[EricKei]

I was apparently on an old FF version (16?) for some time, to I finally upgraded to 19 then 20...Ever since, apparently, it's done the Flash thing (I will do what you guys suggested) and - more annoying to me - it has decided that it can totally ignore the "Warn me when closing multiple tabs" setting. I always have it set to NOT notify, but it does it anyway; this is a major irk for me, as I tend to use multi-tabs almost all of the time x.x

Also, on one comp I use, I keep getting "FF prevented this page from reloading/redirecting" (etc) constantly, even on pages I trust like gmail or fb or notalwaysright....but ONLY on that comp. Home one, exact same version of FF, same settings afaik? Never does it (tho the tab warning is still fooked up)

I'm still trying to figure out why FF adds 1 to the major version number every time they fix a bug >_> (and create fifty new ones...) -- I wanna say that they bragged that they would do a new major release every month for X months some time back...No way that could ever go wrong Seems to me that they just worked on the thing and slapped a new number on it on the first of each new month, whether the changes made justified more than an incremental increase or not...

The only really major huge change between using FF now and when it was in the single digits was the *nullification* of what was once one of its major advantages -- significantly lower RAM usage than other browsers. These days, I get "high memory use" warnings (450MB of RAM and up) with ONE tab open, immediately after opening FF and going pretty much anywhere but my homepage (which is just the FF logo and a google search box) >_> Ugh. I shudder to think what my friend "M", who uses an add-on that allows him to maintain 500+ tabs at a time (and he does) sees for memory usage. How he does it on his old laptop with maybe a gig to a gig and a half of RAM I'll never know...When he asks me how to speed up his comp I tell him to free up space on C (has 10% free if he's lucky) and take it easy on the tabs. While he does make backups, he doesn't want to do either one of those basic things. After all, he NEEDS all of that (downloaded entertainment) media and all of those tabs open at once...