Alden Bates' Weblog

I noticed that ever since I upgraded Firefox to 3.5, it would refuse to shut down properly. The Firefox window would disappear, but when I went to shut down my PC, it would report that Firefox was still running and "not responding".

So I tried a bit of an experiment — I started Firefox up, and then tried to shut it down again. Watching the process in XP's process manager, I could see that it had jumped from using 40MB of memory to 160MB, and hadn't shut down.

I then tried turning off extensions one-by-one. The problem persisted until I disabled Google toolbar. With that disabled, suddenly Firefox began shutting down properly again. "AHA!" said I.

So then I re-enabled Google toolbar, expecting the problem to return. It didn't. I re-enabled my other extensions. No problem, and now Firefox 3.5 seems to be behaving itself. That's mighty strange. Mighty mighty strange. I guess I'll keep an eye on it and see if the problem comes back.