Firefox: the refresh that pauses
Saturday night, at the end of a long day, I noticed that my computer’s ability to navigate Firefox had slowed down.
It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed it; the problem’s been going on for a while. It’s a subtle thing, not too bad but still mighty annoying for a person who uses a computer a lot.
Up popped a message saying that Firefox was running slow, and then it helpfully asked me whether I wanted to refresh it in order to make it go faster.
Now, ordinarily I am intensely conservative about anything involved with the running of my computer. That’s because I’ve noticed over and over that the people who come up with new, improved computer systems seem to have a different idea than I do about what constitutes an “improvement.”
In fact, their ideas and mine have often seemed diametrically opposed.
In particular, they love to do two things. The first is to assure the user that everything will go smoothly and that all settings will be saved. The second is to hide the elements the user loves, so that they never again can be found; and/or to replace words with tiny icons that are nearly indistinguishable from one other and might as well be hieroglyphics as far as I’m concerned.
This Firefox refresh suggestion caught me in a weakened, tired state. Oh, why not? I thought, uncharacteristically throwing caution to the winds. I’d like this to go faster.
Click.
The refresh went about as you’d expect. My familiar landmarks had disappeared, and in their place were icons, cryptic lines or dots, or blank space. What’s more, my bookmarks were gone.
Now, to you that may not seem like much. But I’m a huge user of bookmarks. Over the years I’ve collected hundreds, my little computer library.
Gone. Totally gone.
But although I broke out into a cold sweat, I figured there must be a solution. I found several webpages that purported to offer one. I’ll not bore you further with the tedious tale of exactly what happened when I tried to follow their labyrinthine instructions. Suffice to say it wasn’t pretty, it led to more sweating, and two long hours later I was no closer to a solution than before.
But having gone through denial and anger I leaped ahead to acceptance: Okay, so I’ll redo some of my bookmarks. How hard could it be? I know how to make a bookmark.
And ordinarily I do. But now I discovered that it was impossible to make any new bookmarks at all. My computer had apparently forgotten how.
Many “how to” webpages later and I remained completely stumped. Meanwhile, I had tried shutting down Firefox and starting it again. No dice.
And then suddenly—when I shut down and started Firefox for the second time—all my old bookmarks appeared. How could this be? Had Firefox not shut down properly the first time? Was it something I did or didn’t do?
Or was it just toying with me?
The little row of icons remains, however. I am trying to adjust to the programmers’ seemingly deep and abiding need for me to learn how to use them.
[NOTE: The title of this piece is a riff on this Coca Cola slogan.]
Thank you – I’ve been sorely tempted to try this – you saved me cuz my bookmarks are my memory. So slow it is unless I change browsers…
I share your pain (meant literally with not a trace of Clintonian irony).
When I did this my bookmarks somehow all ended up in a folder labeled “other bookmarks”. No, they’re the only ones I had or cared about, not “other”.
I dumped Firefox after they dumped Brendan Eich (is that his name?). Recently, my 7.5-year-old MacBook Air died. I had faithfully backed it up with Time Machine. I bought a new one, plugged in my external hard drive with the backup, and within a couple of hours there was my computer, all files intact.
After many computers and many browsers, I’ve learned to depend on text files (with backup copies) for anything I want preserved. I use as few automated features as possible, because they just aren’t reliable. Backup software is also treacherous. I keep clones of entire drives, and lots of them. It does get expensive.
I’ve recently switched to the Brave browser started by Brendan Eich. Much faster. I don’t use browser book marks. I have a home built home page with 50+ sites I regularly visit and a collection of notepad subject pages with links about various topics.
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of a smart user of modern computer operating systems.
It only took a second restarting of Firefox? I’ve had to try doing the same exactly correct thing 3 and 4 times in order to get things to work.
To be fair to Firefox, sometimes the first restart finishes the second phase of changes begun before the restart. However, I agree that I’ve become so weary of the seemingly needless churn in software.
I have also gotten that message on occasion. Your experience justifies my not wanting to “improve” things- though I have admittedly been tempted.
Herewith is my sad, sad story–
As things were then, decades ago, when I bought my first in a series of progressively more capable mid-priced computers for the general public, I tried to read up on and to understand the technical details of how these, then, relatively primitive, clunky, and “unfriendly” computers worked—both hardware and software, programming, various software packages, etc.—tried to understand and absorb at least the basics laid out in a number of expensive, several inches thick popular how to/technical manuals, articles in computer magazines, and on line; to actually understand what I was messing with and using, how to get the damn thing to work properly, and to stay up to date.
At one point, I even ordered computer number two or three built to my specifications—got a particular supposedly superior chip set and motherboard installed, and had a better quality, higher output than normal power supply installed, to avoid the problem of underpowered and fluctuating computer power supplies—which I had read somewhere were the causes of way over 50% of all the problems people had encountered with computers.
As well, I was buying, installing and uninstalling, then, reinstalling various programs (funny how load order sometimes makes a big difference) that were supposedly going to “help” me, doing things like trying to use programs to do the Symantic recommended “cleaning” of my register (don’t do this at home folks!), wondering if I should massage my video settings (don’t ever do this at home either, folks!) etc.
It just got to be too complicated, a mess, chewed up a lot of time I could have more profitably used, increased my frustration level and, a lot of the time, left me with a nonfunctional computer, and wondering if a baseball bat might not be the preferable solution.
I discovered that I am not anywhere near as technically minded, and mechanically skilled as I had thought and hoped I might be, nor very good at comprehending the complexity, kinds of specific details, nomenclature, and techniques I needed.
Plus, I had a very demanding day job that used but, other than that, didn’t involve actually opening up the box and “working on computers” or debugging software.
As I discovered—I was not a “techie.”
So, from then on in, I just started to buy off the shelf computers, and what I saw as basic, essential programs.
Pretty soon I learned to dread manufacturer and other “updates,” particularly major OS updates, which often did all sorts of basically unfathomable and untraceable things to wreck whatever set up on my computer I had developed and found satisfactory—on an occasion or two I couldn’t even get the computer to boot up, capabilities and files disappeared, icons disappeared or new, unknown ones showed up on the screen, video cut out, email disappeared and/or no longer worked, I couldn’t get out to the Internet, the video settings sometimes got screwed up, i.e. the computer sometimes became “unstable.”
Computers, I have learned, are a sometimes (working) thing.
Firefox pretty much sucks, or certainly did when I finally gave up on it. I don’t think any browsers are particularly good, perhaps it’s just a difficult programming problem. Anyway, much as I dislike Google, I use Chrome, which seems to have the fewest problems of the browsers I’ve tried. If you want to try it, it seems good at importing the bookmarks you have in whatever other browser (firefox) you are using.
(I wonder if some of these browsers suffer from memory leaks, which I thought were a thing of the past, but chrome at times does tend to start sucking up a lot of memory (I check the task manager) and then I just close it and re-open it, that helps)
My solution to the bookmark problem is to create a document (I use MS Word) containing all my bookmarks (as hyperlinks), organized into groups for easy access.
I save that document in .htm format and identify the file as my home page in every browser (firefox, chrome, safari).
Thus all of my bookmarks are available from any browser. I edit the file to add new URLs as needed.
I have firefox locked up with every security/privacy extension available to it, and this is my default browser going to any public site. I do NOT have javascript enabled.
I use chrome (no security/privacy extensions added) to go to my financial sites. I do not use it for anything else. After I log out of the site, I immediately “clear my browsing history” to remove all cookies and knowledge of what site I had just visited. I do this for every financial/credit card login/logout.
There is a nice extension for firefox named “clear browsing data” that will do the same thing.
And, YES, backup, backup, backup is the only wise action.
One has to wonder what “refresh” actually meant…
Firefox isn’t what it once was; back in the day, it did a good job of faithfully supporting the required standards. It still seems to do this, but it’s also has gained a reputation for memory leaks (for non-techies, it means that it “forgets” to release memory back to the system memory pool on occasion, keeping that memory allocated, but not using it. Over time and use, this exhausts available memory, and slows the computer down since it has to work harder to make memory space available). Given that so many of today’s commercial sites are so ad-intensive, this aggravates the memory problem. Not to mention that the ads themselves are often vectors for infection.
(And, the Mozilla Foundation often gets criticism for being more interested in social justice than good memory-efficient software…)
I’ll second David Aitken’s recommendation; Brave works well, I use it consistently now (I’m using it on iOS to write this very comment). It has built-in ad blockers to limit the impact of adware, and the ability to browse in a “private” space that keeps no history if you want it. On occasion, you’ll find a website that will protest the ad-blocker and refuse to render content (UPI is an example). In this case, you can whitelist it, or simply go elsewhere as I do.
Note that you can have multiple browsers on a given machine, although you do want to take care of managing which one is the “default”. Try not to run both at the same time if you do.
Of course, your bookmarks are an issue; getting them moved to another browser is a non-trivial. Saving them on your own local HTML page is one good answer; it’s a bit of work, but they’re portable to anything that way, because you manage them yourself.
To easily back up your bookmarks, click on the Bookmarks icon, and select Show All Bookmarks. That pops up a dialog box with a menu item labeled Import and Backup. Click that and select the Export Bookmarks to HTML item. It will output all your bookmarks to a single file, and you can use it to import them the next time your bookmarks get lost.
They also have a Sync feature, and it works well most of the time, but I’d never trust it as my only backup source. I use both Sync and manually export my bookmarks to HTML and make multiple backups of that HTML file on different computers and cloud storage services.
What Jim said. Use export like clockwork every month, know exactly where that exported file lives on your hard drive, back *that* up to the cloud or a thumb drive every time, and know how to import them back in. That way you have complete control of the process and know what you’re doing.
A good upgrade process would not have “disappeared” your bookmarks even temporarily.
No matter what the issue is, however little you think it could help, always try restarting the program, then the machine before beginning a research expedition. Countless hours of Googling can be saved with these steps.
Some years ago I became the de facto I.T. person in our office. Simply because I am able to Google for solutions. I refuse to help anyone until I know they have tried these 2 things.
The trouble with almost all software is that the producer of said software must justify the salaries paid to their coding employees. And those employees must justify their existence by coming up with “new and improved” versions of said software. In my view all this does is violate the old maxim of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it!”
For profit making companies, the idea of producing an excellent piece of software means they will be less able to sell you a new, improved version. Or they take the Microsoft route and do not support a previous version and get everyone else to go along, then you find yourself with a perfectly good computer with perfectly good software that can no longer access most of the material on the web.
You may want to back up your bookmarks
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-backup-firefox-bookmarks-4587271
Additionally, you can backup your profile:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data
I agree with the brave browser users, that is an excellent alternative to Chrome. I have come to the conclusion that Chrome is hazardous and leaks data to Google.
This, I admit, is not quite on topic, but does deal with what I call “Frustrating Mysteries of the Internet.” What’s the deal (as Jerry Seinfeld might say) with Outlook Express? How did they get to be so ubiquitous? They must have greased a lot of palms, I suspect. Nearly every time I’m on the Internet, trying to contact someone via website (especially is the website is government or corporate), and there’s a place in “Contact” where I click on the person’s name, I am shunted off to a pop-up for Outlook Express. What’s really annoying is that it isn’t the gateway means of e-mailing the person, but a roadblock: none of the computers I’m using, at least, allow me access to the all-powerful Outlook Express. Anyone else have this experience? If so, did you ever find a way around it?
One basic rule for you, Neo — BACK UP YOUR BOOKMARKS.
Go to the top menu — “Tools”
Click on “Downloads”
This should open a new window, “Library”
Go to “All bookmarks” in the left-hand pane
Up in the window’s top menu you should see “Import and Backup”. Click on it.
Click on “Export to HTML”. Put the file (“Bookmarks.htm”) somewhere YOU CAN FIND IT.
Option1 — give it a better name — add the date to it, suggest “yymmdd”, e.g., for today, “Bookmarks-190826.htm”. The benefit to this is that they’ll sort properly so you can always tell the older ones from the newer ones. This is good if something happens to a bookmark and you don’t notice it until you go looking for it years later.
Option2 — STRONGLY suggest you back it up somewhere else — onto a DVD, or a thumbdrive, or a file storage in the cloud — you can send it to yourself in an e-mail, alternatively. This way, if your hard drive goes belly up, you still have them.
P.S., yes, even though I’m pretty well versed in computers (it’s my profession) it took me almost five minutes to figure out where they’d hidden this necessary feature. :-/ I’m not a huge fan of “software updates” from large companies. They often seem more like IT departments justifying their staff than actual functional improvements.
Seriously though. BACK THAT SUCKER UP.
I also suggest you take the time, one way or another, to back up your entire system about once a year or so. People fail to realize how much of their computer’s functionality consists of small tweaks that they’ve made in its operation over time, and how much of an utter pain it is to get it back into that state. Even if you backed up all your “important data” — that configuration stuff is very nontrivial.
😉
BTW, at a guess, what happened is that your bookmarks WERE backed up to your registered account. When you updated, they were gone, until you shut FFox down and restarted it again, at which point they were restored from the backup on your account.
REGARDLESS, I, personally, still trust my own copy to ones in the cloud. I know when they were done, and what things have “changed” since the last backup. The ones automagically done for you are nice, but I always want my own copy.
Imagine a world in which your decision to buy a computer was based on the software you wanted to run. In the middle ages of personal computing, I chose a software suite (the Perfect suite) and then bought the machine to run it. (wait for it)
A Kaypro…..
Believe it or not, it still does today what it did very well in 1984. I switched to the Mac in 1994, and haven’t looked back. I am loathe to update software and operating systems. I simply have no trust in the underlying reasons stated for such.
Sometimes browsers run slower if one has too many windows open.
Bilwick, I share your frustration trying to email someone with an Outlook email.
Vandeutely rleun:
That was absolutely NOT the problem. It ran especially slowly when I would first use it after turning the computer on.
I am the poster child for the dangers of not backing up. My ancient and never-very-good little laptop died recently. I didn’t have much on the hard drive that I needed to save — most stuff was in the cloud, on flash drives or in other computers, which is why I hadn’t worried much about backing up. I wasn’t worried about bookmarks because, hey, Chrome is portable, right? But no, not so much. I replaced the antique with a newer and slightly fancier model, signed in to Google and opened up Chrome, which promised to remember all my bookmarks. (I quit using Firefox after the Brendan Eich thing and hate Windows Explorer and Edge.) And yes, it did indeed remember my bookmarks — from several years ago. The bookmarks and folders from the past two or three years ago were gone. I tried all kinds of things, but that was months ago and they’ve never reappeared. I have a kind of to-heck-with-it feeling and haven’t bothered since then to rebuild my library. But when I do, I’m going to 1) export them regularly and 2) back them up and 3) I don’t know what else, but not trust Chrome not to lose them on me again.
Now, ordinarily I am intensely conservative about anything involved with the running of my computer. That’s because I’ve noticed over and over that the people who come up with new, improved computer systems seem to have a different idea than I do about what constitutes an “improvement.”
neo: You got that right. When I was young and innocent, I always upgraded to the latest, greatest rev, eager as a child on Christmas morn.
Now I won’t upgrade unless there is a gun to my head or I’m just feeling devil-may-care.
Having worked in the biz, I know how it works. The latest rev might fix a bug or two, but mostly marketing demands new features for the sake of checkbox lists, or worse, adding spyware or copy-protection schemes.
Mrs Whatsit: I ditched FireFox too after Brendan Eich was ousted.
I’m using Opera which has a light footprint compared to the others.
I’ve been meaning to try Brave, but it didn’t support the EverNote extension which is now essential to my browsing. I can see that it does now.
“Pretty soon I learned to dread manufacturer and other “updates,” particularly major OS updates, which often did all sorts of basically unfathomable and untraceable things to wreck whatever set up on my computer I had developed and found satisfactory”
“a voice crying in the wilderness” has the right idea.
One good piece of advice I read years ago was to never update an OS, outside of the few security patches that come in from time to time; better to just buy a new machine if you wanted any of the new features, or needed to be connected to other upper-dated machines.
Keep using the one you like as well, until it dies, but be sure to update everything that you can, as amply detailed by our resident techies.
Which reminds me….
One more thing –
I have had many a miserable time trying to FIND the bookmark I wanted, especially when looking for just that one special article to link in a comment.
At some point, probably by accident, I discovered I could edit the way the link was stored in my bookmark folders by adding more descriptive content to the “name” (without changing the URL).
I still can’t always find what I know I bookmarked, but it’s getting easier.
Now this, from another dumb cluck who expected that when they (the hardware/software companies & gurus) said *insert intensely reassuring claim and helpful advice here* they were speaking Truth to the Powerless:
Aesop’s comment prompts me to mention that nowadays, when I save anything at all, I try to include the URL in the file-name. What with some combination of this wonderful Mavericks OS X (which I hate; I still run OS X 10.6.8 on the MacBook Pros) on the AirBook (a.k.a. MacBook Air for short) with or without the Cruzer flash-drives I use, it’s impossible to save the URL reliably in the Comments box of the Information box for the file.
(I don’t include the internet-calling designation ‘ https:// ‘ part in the URL, as a rule. The OS doesn’t approve of colons in the filename. Sometimes it tells me I can’t do that, and sometimes it substitutes a dash+space for the colon. I do leave 2 spaces at both ends of the URL, for ease of getting the right character-string should I wish to copy the URL, but of course leave the final dot just before the file-type. Thus, ___ .htm or ___ .mp4 or ___ .xls etc., where the ___ is the URL.)
. . .
For those of you who use Time Machine, is it possible to use the TM backup as you start-up disk without further ado such as Carbon Copy Cloner?
Even if it isn’t, will restoring directly from the TM backup put everything back precisely where it was, i.e. with the same machine addresses and so pointers?
And that prompts me to ask whether, when restoring from TM B/U, I should somehow erase the internal HD? (A very scary thought. I should think that wouldn’t even be possible unless you can start up from the TM external B/U.)
Thanks very much to anyone who feels moved to enlighten me. I try to make sense of the various “help” sites (Apple, Mozilla, MacRumors, anything else I can find including videos), but they all seem to disagree and also seem to need a lot of reading between the lines. I know I’ve gotten some useless or downright bad advice from the good ol’ Genius Bar folks and the Apple techs over the phone.
And, it’s true. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. (Applies also to the Constitution, she noted with a bit of a snarl.)
–J.
Firefox deserves to die (because Brendan Eich)…only slightly less than Chrome does (because Google).
But Brave isn’t half-bad.