Every so often Firefox running on my Win10 desktop machine will have its head shoved up its arse by some misbehaving online process (MS Outlook is particularly prone to doing this, but it’s not the only one - my Firefox seems just to have been banjaxed simply by trying to download a large-ish PDF, for example).
When this happened back in the day CTRL ALT DEL would immediately (and I do mean immediately) bring up a window within which I could cleanly zombie-knife the failed process, say Firefox, out of its and my misery.
Nowadays though it seems CTRL ALT DEL has been moved right to the back of the queue and keying it in does nothing for ages. In the meantime I have to sit and watch the head-up-arse process slowly choke to death, presumably on its own faeces.
I’m 66 already and I really don’t have the time for this. So is there something Windows-compatible I can invoke* that gives me the option of shutting dead-but-still-thrashing-about stuff down ?
*I’m aware that holding the physical Power Off button down, or even just pulling the IEC connector out of the back of the PC works in a rather satisfying “Let’s see who’s really in charge then shall we ?” kinda way. But it can also have consequences that I’d sometimes prefer to avoid.
Yes, that is what CTRL ALT DEL does now. Unfortunately it is impossibly slow now.
After waiting a little while I eventually pressed CTRL ALT DEL while Firefox was trying to download the PDF. The mouse cursor had frozen on screen. Nothing happened (at least, I could see nothing happening) but the HDD continued whirring like a demented sewing machine. Nothing happened. Nothing happened some more. Eventually I got up and went to make a cup of coffee. When I came back Firefox had completely self-aborted and now I had the window offering me, among other things, Task Manager.
So in a sense the right things did happen. Just in the wrong order. I want keys I can hit which interrupt the failing process and allow me to terminate it rather than waiting for it to die of its own accord before getting round to doing anything. I want Maximus, not Commodus, even though the latter has a high-powered bodyguard and a state-of-the-art wagon and the poshest clothing and a foxy sister,
Graeme, I got fed up with Firefox being so slow on my w10 pc. I have downloaded Waterfox which appears to be Firefox as it used to be. All the Extensions and other stuff seem to work. Waterfox is open-source and seems very like Firefox of old.
I’ll scribble it on a post-it and stick it on the monitor for next time.
Interesting. That might be worth a try. I’m completely inexpert when it comes to these things but as well as being able to shut failed/failing things down it would also be better if they didn’t fail in the first place, and maybe Waterfox would help with that ?
I do, and not uncommonly experience something very similar to Graeme - when it happens Task Manager is locked out completely and the only way to get anything back on line is to hard restart, nothing else works. Admittedly I have poverty-spec Win11 which should probably be recognsied as malware…
Microshite are VERY anxious to have you use Outlook, and I’ve long-suspected they do all they can to actively hobble non-Microshite apps - a trend that’s been tangible all the way back to Netscape days.
Occasionally this forum will lock up - the window will go blank and look like it’s refreshing but never actually achieve that. It doesn’t lock the whole machine though so I can open another tab, open the AA in the new tab (it recognises that I’m already logged in) and switch to using the forum there. The original tab continues stuck in blank indefinitely, as far as I know, but of course I just close it and drag the new one to where it was.
Weird eh ?
I do use Outlook (used to be hotmail) and I sometimes wonder whether Mozilla are trying to hobble it. But I reckon it’s more likely that MS want me to switch to Edge and are prepared to stab their own product in the face when I run it under Firefox to see if that will make me switch (if you’re reading this guys, it won’t).
Change your DNS to 94.140.14.14 & 94.140.15.15 or install adblock and see if that improves things:
If you don’t have any web or DNS filtering the browser can get swamped trying to load all the external links, adverts and cookies etc. If you don’t have a lot of RAM or the PC is old the browser could just bog down and hang.
Alt+F4 on my lappy toggles the microphone on-and-off…
Anything+F4 does the same…
“This one trick makes computers hate him!”
Microshite are MASTERS of enshittification - every new Windows iteration wrests yet more cuntrol [sic] away from the user, and wanks yet more processor/memory-ravenous bloatware all over the shop…
Today I revisited the webpage that bust Firefox yesterday. I now suspect it wasn’t Firefox’s fault (in a sense). The problem seems to be that the PDF on the page took an unbelievably long time to download, and neither Firefox nor anything else running on the machine would respond in an ‘on screen’ sense while the download was trying to complete.
I tried ALT F4 on it. This got the stalled on-screen FF window out of the way, but it only seemed to minimise it, not actually shut it down. So the FF tab (is that what they’re called ?) was still there at the bottom of the screen (is that thing called the toolbar ?) and I still couldn’t use the machine to do anything else while the download tried to complete. It didn’t stop me going for a shower though.
I also tried ALT SHIFT ESC. That did open Task Manager directly, but not immediately. Again the ultra-slow download seemed to be getting in the way.
Be warned, this page did stall my whole machine pretty comprehensively. I’ll post the link here in case anyone wants to risk having their day spoiled too. But please don’t click on this if you don’t want to take that risk https://www.kevinchant.com/uploads/7/1/0/8/7108231/el351500010406.pdf.
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. It did shut down the open window though, albeit I didn’t try it on one that was bust.