this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Have you tried to start it from the terminal? Maybe there is some insight into which part of the startup process is taking so much time
When I was trying to solve this issue I tried pretty much everything. It boils down to something related to my profile. Start without one or with a different one, it works as expected. The moment I sync my profile it bogs down. And am not sure what is wrong with my profile. I have a lot of bookmarks but not abnormally so. History is configured as with everyone else, no special config there.
What if you export your bookmarks and your addons, then delete your profile, create a new profile and sync NOTHING from your firefox account. Then import the boomarks, restart and see if that is the issue. Then add your addons one by one and restart inbetween to see if one acts up. Then change your firefox settings. Then turn your sync back on. Also are you using a normal installation or a flatpak, snap, etc?
Tried that. The moment bookmarks are in and I sync account that's when it slows down. So I have to forego one or both. Also am not using neither installation nor flatpak, it's a simple tar ball because it's FF Dev edition. Doesn't come packaged.
Is it just bookmarks, or is it bookmarks and sync? I'd export your bookmarks as JSON or something and look through it, either with a text editor or some tool, and make sure there isn't some enormously huge string, or one containing unsupported characters, that's tripping something up somehow.
To be honest at this point I forgot. It's been a while since I dealt with this issue. I'll live with it as is.
Import your bookmarks in sections until you hit the one malware URL that's mining coin through the Firefox's interface.
This is some proper troubleshooting.
Maybe export your profile to some other browser. Wipe your Firefox install and all of its user data. Reinstall Firefox import from the other browser.
The moment I import bookmarks and add my FF account things slow down. Tried all of that already.
That's an interesting tell. Assuming you don't have several gigs of bookmarks, The next step would be to break the bookmark file apart into multiple pieces and see which section is punking you. Hell even just exporting it to HTML, You might find a really long or malformed mark by looking over the file.
Anyway, here I go providing more support for somebody that's not asking for it. Good luck in your endeavors
It's not that I am not asking for it, it's just that I've been through all of this multiple times. Tried things in my power to fix to no success. I have indeed became indifferent. Am guessing someone at Mozilla could have dug up where the issue lies if they cared enough but most frequent answer I've got from them was "do a refresh".
Also, no, I don't have gigabytes of bookmarks. But even if I did, that shouldn't really affect startup time. We have databases for a reason, just query at the moment I search for them.
What if you delete all your bookmarks? Does that help?
What about deleting all bookmarks, reinstall Firefox then sync account with no bookmarks.
What about exporting bookmarks and adding them to a fresh Firefox without a profile.
I think bookmarks are part of the issue but not whole. It's been more than a year since I tried debugging this and gave up. My machine doesn't get shut down often and this wait happens only on fresh start. So I kind of learned to live with it.