from Hacker News

Some time in the last week, Firefox (latest by auto updates) on Lubuntu (latest by auto updates) has been freezing up briefly, then coming back (in seconds). But once that starts, eventually it freezes the whole machine. The only thing that works is I can move the mouse around, but i can't focus on any other windows. I can't even ctrl-alt-F1 to get a console. Power cycle. There's no crash report after, as far as I can tell.

And yeah, I uninstalled a couple addons that were recently installed, no improvement. And no, I didn't disable all my addons (about 10), and I didn't start it in safe mode.

Rather than incrementally take away addons, which might reveal a symptom (note, not reveal the problem), I decided to see what happens if I don't use Firefox. And both problems went away, the freezing, and the need to troubleshoot the freezing.

So I've been using Chromium for a few days. I don't like it. But the thing is, Firefox does everything I want, most of the time, and Chromium does some of what I want, all the time. And my fan's quieter.

I tried to write essentially this same message on the Firefox support forum. I had to reset my password, and I'm still waiting for the reset link two hours later (I checked spam and my other account). So I'm sending this message through a friend, because you won't pick up the phone.

This seems to go in cycles. A couple years ago Firefox had a poor performance reputation, and they fixed it, and I was happy. But I don't want to go through the cycle anymore.

Eventually I'll probably go to Uzbl, but that's a bit more of a leap than I want right now, I'm in the middle of something.

Good luck, I hope you work it out. I need to move on.