Is Firefox really unbearably slow?

[Philoctetes]

I am running Firefox under XP, with Norton 360. All automatically updated. Firefox is just getting slower and slower to start up, today taking 24 minutes from click to show. Task Manager shows it loading up to 400,000k of memory before it deigns to say hello! When i am in, it usually behaves quite well. I have also been getting occasional "script failure" messages, for different scripts in different sites. Any hints of what I should be looking at - and, no, I don't want advice to use other software unless absolutely necessary, as this is all fairly standard stuff and should work together.

[Buenchico]

The solution to your problem is probably really simple. I suspect that all you need to do is to download Firefox again and then to reinstall it. (You don't need to uninstall it first and all of your bookmarks & settings will be retained). That solves at least 99% of all Firefox problems.

Chris

[dabees]

Have you tried another browser, to see if it's a connection problem? I have found Chrome quicker, but I still prefer FF. If it seems much quicker, disable all add ons, and re-enable them one at a time to see if an update to one of them is causing an issue.

[jno]

my Firefox takes maybe 20 seconds at the most to appear (XP, but no Norton), which is as slow as I'd want it to be. But if you have Internet Explorer already loaded on your computer, as many do, see how long it takes, as a check.

[Philoctetes]

Taking the obvious route of getting rid of unnecessary guff first, I removed "Google desktop Search" - and, though not perfect, things are an awful lot better. I shall continue to work on this, following the advive given here. let you know!