Firefox has recently started locking up whenever I try to open some websites, and it then starts to hog computer resources by going up to use 50-60% of my CPU where it typically uses 5-15%.

Question

I have had issues within the last three weeks or so where Firefox will lock up when accessing websites like deviantArt.com or Facebook, and sometimes even Google searches. When trying to load these sites, sometimes the program locks up and starts using 50-60% of my CPU and sometimes a steadily increasing amount of RAM. The only way I can fix it is to go into Task Manager and kill the program, then restart Firefox. This isn't always a fix, either, as sometimes the same exact problem immediately occurs when I reload Firefox and have to kill it again through TM. I typically have four to six tabs open, and have never had issues with Firefox like this before the approximate date of the 17th of September. Could this issue have been caused in the more recent updates?

Answer 1

try this:
For me the solution was the network.http.max-connections setting. Lowering this setting from it's default of 256 to 32 fixed the issue. If you haven't tried changing this maybe give it a go by typing about:config into your address bar, then click on the network.http.max-connections setting and changing the value to 32.