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.

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.