Firefox fails to respond when searching some websites

Question

example.Start a search in ebay. no problem until trying to scroll down a list of items or trying to open a listed item's information. Programme appears to lock up or not respond, hourglass is present for long periods of time, double click on blue bar at top of screen, presents a message "Firefox not responding" this happens all of the time on ebay and TPG internet sites, I do have some problem with Commonwealth securities, some tabs open as blank pages yet the same page on ASX site opens with information. all other sites visited appear normal.
Regards Dick Wills

Answer 1

Try the first solution listed here below and you can try the other ones to speed up Firefox also.
How to Stop Firefox plugin-container.exe Process?
By TechnoGadge on July 15, 2010 at 6:30 am
http://www.technogadge.com/how-to-stop-firefox-plugin-container-exe-process/
Firefox 3.6.6 make browsing slow on your computer? If yes, it may be due to plugin-container.exe, which was added in recent version of Firefox to prevent browser crash. New version of Firefox web browser loads certain plugins in a separate process (plugin-container.exe) to provide you uninterrupted browsing even when certain plugins stops working. But the problem is, plugin-container.exe may use a lot of memory and slow down your computer. You may experience the problem more often while viewing online flash videos. So, want to disable or stop plugin-container.exe in Firefox 3.6.6? Follow these simple steps:
SEE THE ATTACHED PICTURE WHICH WOULD BE HERE
Steps to stop plugin-container.exe process:
• Open Firefox web browser.
• Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter key.
• A warning will appear. Ignore it and press the "I’ll be careful, I promise!" button.
• In the Filter field type dom.ipc. Six preferences will appear for the filter dom.ipc.
• Ignore first and last preferences. Toggle (double-click) each of the four remaining preferences to change the value from "true" to "false".
• That’s it. Look the screenshot.
Explanation: The crash protection feature in Firefox 3.6 is enabled for certain plugins only. The four preferences that we modified here specifies four different out-of-process plugins. They are the the NPAPI test plugin, Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime (Windows) and Microsoft Silverlight (Windows). These plugins are specified in a separate dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.<filename> preference by default is set to true. We can disable them by changing their value to false. And thus plugin-container.exe will not run. By default the preference dom.ipc.plugins.enabled is already set to "false". So, no need to touch it. The dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs is also not important here as other values are false.
http://www.technogadge.com/how-to-stop-firefox-plugin-container-exe-process/
Making Firefox faster Helpful sites – (Note some of this can be repetitive, and some dated.)
1. I liked this one although not complete, tells you how to make adjustments based on your computer and connection speeds.
http://www.dagorret.net/2010/04/26/optimize-firefox-as-equipment-characteristics-and-speed-adsl/
2. This site gives a good complete overview on what to try and change to pick up speed.
http://webanthology.net/all-you-need-to-optimize-firefox-for-better-performance-33-tips/2009/11/29/
3. This site has some screen shots which sometimes helps to visualize when you are doing this stuff. I do disagree with a blank home page though. I like mine to go to a search engine ( I use Google). I’ll accept the one or two seconds and takes to load that page and its’ resources. Blank pages are ugly!
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-ultimate-guide-to-speeding-up-firefox-3-5/
That should do it for Firefox, the rest of my links were for Windows Vista optimizing.
Again, if you don’t have them, I highly recommend the following add-ons:
Ad Block Plus – Who wants to look at advertisements anyhow? (This is just amazing on how it cleans up browsing!) - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865/
WOT – You’ll need this because some of the features to speed up Firefox decrease its security supposedly. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3456/
Flashblock – This I just added and am still tweaking. The thing you must do is create a whtelist for sites you want to have run Flash: YouTube, Gmail, etc. -
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433/
FastestFox- I don’t know what all this does, but just the scroll down for the next page feature for most web sites visited is well worth loading it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9825/
Tab Mix Plus – I like this one just to be able to customize the tab features.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122/
Better Privacy – This can get rid of so called long term or permanent cookies that are not cleared when you clear your cookies history. Marketing companies, adware, spyware, etc. usually put these on your computer. They are called LSO’s here and can be removed. If you don’t have this loaded, you are gonna be amazed or freaked at all the sites that are tracking your key strokes.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623/