Firefox 3 on Mac OS Performance Problems

For the past week or so, my Firefox on Mac OS (10.5.5) has been crawling. Previously, it had periodically done this — after a while just stopped working, sometimes necessitating a hard reset of the lappy.

This did not make me happy.

For the past week or so, my Firefox on Mac OS (10.5.5) has been crawling. Previously, it had periodically done this — after a while just stopped working, sometimes necessitating a hard reset of the lappy.

This did not make me happy.

I read a lot of options, and disabled all of my extensions. No love. I uninstalled them all. Nothing. I finally resorted to reinstalling Firefox wholesale.

Nothing.

What I ended up doing was removing the ~/Library/Application_Support/Firefox directory. Started Firefox, now it works fine. At some point, something in there had become irretrievably horked.

The only extensions I’ve reinstalled are Firebug (which I can’t live without), ColorZilla, and MeasureIt. ForecastFox has many known issues, so I left it out. I’ll probably reinstall WebDeveloper in a few minutes and see what happens.

Thankfully, I keep my bookmarks on delicious, and very little is tied directly to the browser.