Problem with sudden Firefox slowing

You’re very welcome. It’s obviously my pleasure to dig through these little puzzles when I can. Usually one of the regulars has the time and does a better job than I can on stuff that doesn’t involve Firefox.

I wouldn’t consider dropping ThreatFire unless you have a crash again and the crash report lists TFWAH.dll. I don’t recall hearing that ThreatFire is generally problematic or ill-advised. I don’t use happen to use it. Avast 5 plus WinPatrol is enough for me.

It sounds like you’ve done your homework. Good for you! No security software is 100% and just adding more to the mix doesn’t make things much safer. IMHO, they can make browsing less safe if you rely on them due to a false sense of security. Safe browsing habits are much, much more important. Does WD stand for Windows Defender? For me, I think Avast + WinPatrol is plenty. The NoScript extension does a great job at protecting us from hacked or malicious web site attacks, especially the zero-day attacks that signature-based security software can’t detect.

Alan

WD meant Windows Defender which comes preinstalled with Vista.
But I do wonder whether all this stuff (e.g.TF and Supar AntiSpyware) on top of NS and Adblock - both of which are recommended by Firefox, as my surfing is not reckless - but you never know!

You are obvioulsy more informed than I am - so if Avast and Winpatrol are enough for you, maybe I should trim off SAS and TF, substituting the latter with WinPatrol, which I am about to investigate in case of another TFWAH.dll . It uses the same principle as TF - heuristic and has a similarly small footprint - I would be thinking of the free version after deinstalling SAS and TF.

But thanks once again - I was stumped, but thanks to this forum have outgrown the habit of using the “fun cleanup” remedies!

Yeah, don’t pay for WinPatrol until you’ve used it for awhile and find it personally valuable. Since SAS is non-resident, there’s no need to uninstall it. It doesn’t hurt to run it occasionally to see what it finds. If SAS or Avast ever finds anything serious that isn’t a false positive, see if you can figure out where it came from and perhaps modify your browsing/downloading habits accordingly. I figure that if Avast ever legitimately flags something I downloaded as malware, then I shouldn’t have downloaded it in the first place and was just lucky it was detected.

It loads drivers at boot time and, if I’m not wrong, services also.
Too much for an on-demand scanner only.
Nothing against SAS, just my personal opinion (as always :)).

Tech,

your right, yes it does, but its usage is next to nill while its sitting there, a user can always disable the startup if its that aggrevating. I have one laptop with it disabled on startup, and the other its not. The one its not lets me start it with less clicks and waiting.

I wouldnt NOT use it just because of this issue.

Sat

Thank you for chiming in, Tech. I’m pretty sure SAS free wasn’t running any services or start-up programs for me. I may have disabled them with Autoruns or WinPatrol. I don’t have SAS installed now so I’m going on memory. (When Secunia PSI notified me a while ago that SAS had a security update available, I uninstalled it instead of updating because I realized I didn’t use it anymore. I can always reinstall it later if desired.)

And it doesn’t find that much anyway…
asyn

Yeah, Autoruns could disable the drivers loading…
I’ve stop using also due to save time on updatings… The update is the full database (not incremental) and I was using too much things on demand. My strategy now is: only avast (I’ve disabled ThreatFire and Winpatrol), full partitions backups, Comodo Time Machine (beta).

+1 Only cookies…

+1 Only cookies…
[/quote]
going off topic…

Hmm, I didnt know that, thank you both for the heads up, I will no longer recommend SAS to anyone here again…I guess I should dump it, and malwarebytes as well, as it doenst find much anyways either using your logic. Its found 1 thing on my system in 1.5 years, so wasted space.

I wont used Asquared, it always finds lots of stuff, but the wrong stuff. I guess on damand scanning isnt needed at all.

again, thank you both for the correction on my thinking, I appreciate it, Ive learned something new today.

i appologize for going offtopic
Sat

SAS and MalwareBytes may not be very useful on clean systems like ours, Sat, but, along with Avast 5, their on-demand scanners can be very useful for evaluating an unknown system or a system that seems to be misbehaving.

  1. If you know how to handle it, it’s not a problem… :wink:
  2. Wrong, imo. I would keep Mbam, as a second opinion it might be helpful in the future… (Only if you have very good layered protection, there would be maybe no need for it…! But I don’t know your level of experience/knowledge…)
    asyn

I also second keeping an on-demand scanner for a “just in case” scenario and recommend MBAM. I tried SAS and had similar experience as Tech. But everyone uses their machine for different things, so I also have a cloud AV as a extra layer of defense; I guess I’m a bit paranoid, huh? ;D

Hi Fx-users,

You can display any web page free of any browser baggage as shown in the screen shot. To do so, you need access to a command line, In windows press windows+r and type in cmd. This starts the command prompt. Then move to the Firefox install area with these commands:

C:\cd “Program Files”

cd Firefox / or cd mozilla firefox 3 beta 3

Next, on all operating systems, just invoke Firefox with the required web page like this:

firefox -chrome url

Example: firefox -chrome www.geniushackers.com

polonus

Hello Alan Baxter if you are still out there,

The churning started again at that same site. logged into the same forum. This time I shut Firefox down, suspended Threatfire, and Firefox is now fine.

If this continues to be the case I shall deinstal Threatfire, which leaves me with NS, AdBlockPlus, Windows Defender and Avast.

Regards -

I should have made it clear in my last that Firefox slowed again (churned) but DID NOT CRASH this time - so I suspended Threatfire on restart and it still seems fine.

ThreatFire has, from time to time, issues with Firefox addons. Sometimes you need to turn it off, update the addons, close Firefox, turn it on.

Still out here. Going by what you and Tech say, it sounds like ThreatFire doesn’t play nicely enough with Firefox and its extensions. Thank you for letting me know. I’ll try and remember that if I ever run across another ThreatFire user who’s having Firefox problems.

I have no problems with Firefox v3.6.4 using Threatfire and I have 15 add-on extensions, what I would do is reinstall firefox again sometime it doesn’t always installed in correctly :-\

SpeedyPC
“I have no problems with Firefox v3.6.4 using Threatfire and I have 15 add-on extensions, what I would do is reinstall firefox again sometime it doesn’t always installed in correctly”

The latest update of Firefox v3.6.4 seems to have cured it, although I avoid Flash updates “we have deteceted your missing” says the prompt to update. I wonder if it is genuine - “your missing” should be “you’re/you are missing” - not very professional if genuine.

I think I dislike this Out Of Process Plugin

If for some reason you need to disable multi-process plugins, set the pref dom.ipc.plugins.enabled to false.

I think these plugins are worth giving a try

RAMback

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5972/

SaveMemory

You can pause unused tabs and save upto 80% RAM and CPU

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/108863