Hotmail horribly slow in Firefox - FIXED

[ColinJ]

I still use a few old Hotmail accounts and access them using Firefox. Something happened a while back and access to Hotmail became horribly slow. Slow enough for me to be able to switch to CycleChat and post here while Hotmail was loading!

It has been doing my head in so I finally decided to find out what was going on and fix it. After a few false starts, I tracked down the problem. Hotmail now loads so quickly that I literally blinked and missed it first time after the fix.

Anyway, in case any of you have been suffering the same problem, try this ...

Type about:config in the address bar.

Take note of the warning, then proceed ...

Search for gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled and double click on that entry to set it to false.

Close the window.

Load Hotmail and watch it fly!

(That will probably save me 10 minutes every day ...)

 

[twentysix by twentyfive]

Well done Colin. How many "saved" 10 mins did it take to find that?

 

[ColinJ]

Well done Colin. How many "saved" 10 mins did it take to find that?

It took me 10 minutes to find it, but about 365 * 10 minutes to get so annoyed that I bothered to do it!

 

[twentysix by twentyfive]

It took me 10 minutes to find it, but about 365 * 10 minutes to get so annoyed that I bothered to do it!

Sounds familiar

 

[shouldbeinbed]

I've fought shy of Firefox for a few niggles like that, I may give it another pop and make the effort to find the answer rather than the unistall option.

 

[mjr]

That's going to make some sites look odd. There's probably a way to disable it only for hotmail, as it sounds like they're sending fonts slowly.

 

[ColinJ]

[QUOTE 3862893, member: 259"]Hotmail? [/QUOTE]
Hotmail/Live - historical use ... Any of my new contacts are not given those Hotmail addresses but there are lots of people/organisations from the past who still contact me using them.

That's going to make some sites look odd. There's probably a way to disable it only for hotmail, as it sounds like they're sending fonts slowly.

I hadn't even realised that sites did send fonts until this problem was identified! I'm surprised that it is deemed necessary when there must be scores or even hundreds of perfectly acceptable fonts already available on most systems.

I don't know what the problem between Firefox/Hotmail/Live is but it was really annoying me.

I only use Firefox as one of my backup browsers when Opera plays up, and it did start playing up with Hotmail a couple of years ago. I can't see any font funnies on Hotmail/Live now, and it works at the speed it should do now.

 

[Pale Rider]

[QUOTE 3862893, member: 259"]Hotmail? [/QUOTE]

I use hotmail for my one personal email account.

Does the job, not that I use more than a handful of the hundreds of features.

Hotmail was popular at one time with small businessmen/one man bands because it looked less cluttered and cartoony than the other free email services.

 

[Dan B]

Firefox 39 supports woff2 fonts, which are supposed to be smaller and faster. Don't know if that would help with Hotmail, just thought I'd mention it

 

[ColinJ]

Firefox 39 supports woff2 fonts, which are supposed to be smaller and faster. Don't know if that would help with Hotmail, just thought I'd mention it

No idea what all of this is, but I checked and they are enabled in my version of Firefox (40.0.2).