Firefox 3.5 hangs on large forms

[Guest]

I've found that Firefox 3.5 reliably hangs a few seconds after loading a page that contains a very large form. I've verified that there are not multiple sessionstore.js files in the profile. Firefox 3.0.11, IE7, IE8, and Safari do not have this problem. What happens is that Firefox hangs; the OS reports it as "not responding"; if you leave it, eventually it begins to respond again (this took about 6 minutes for the 3000+ checkbox form I was viewing); but freezes again once you've typed a few characters into the form or clicked a few checkboxes. The same form worked flawlessly with Firefox 3.0.11, IE7 and IE8, and Safari 4.

I suspect that this problem may have to do with changes made in the session restoration function in 3.5. I think that FF 3.5 is trying to save the state on this very large form, and it's taking so long that the browser simply times out. I'd like to test this by disabling sessionstore. I found instructions on this for Firefox 2 (involving about:config and setting browser.sessionstore.enabled to "false"), but as far as I can determine, browser.sessionstore.enabled is not available in Firefox 3.5.

Does anyone know a way to disable sessionstore entirely in FF 3.5?

[Guest]

I just ran into the same problem, your post helped, I hadn't considered the session saver. Anyway, Since I use the tabmixplus addon, I figured I'd test this out. It has an option to disable firefox's default session manager(I have no clue how it does it, but it proves it is possible). I also disabled tabmixplus's session manager. My webpage with about 500 editable boxes on it no longer locks up. So, your suspicions were correct.

Anyway, along with disabling it, it has options to reduce the frequency of saves, by default it's 10 seconds. I haven't tested with just using tabmixplus's session manager, but since that's the setup I had before 3.5, I'm guessing it will still work.

[Gingerbread Man]

I've found that Firefox 3.5 reliably hangs

If you've found a reproducible problem in Firefox, you should report it to the developers. Go to Bugzilla and search to see if the issue has already been reported. If it hasn't, file a new bug report.

[ericccarlson]

I can confirm this as well. I'm seeing very sluggish behavior on HTML forms in Firefox 3.5. Seriously considering a downgrade to 3.0.

[Littlemutt]

Your hitting bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477564 , that has been fixed in what will be 3.6 when it comes out. No time frame for that yet, probably mid-late fall. Does not look like its going to be add to the 3.5.x stream.

[Guest]

Thanks for that. I was going to downgrade.

[Guest]

Thanks for that. I was going to downgrade.

We use liquid office eforms and 3.5.2 is playing havoc wtih it. Our whole university might have to downgrade.