Internet browsers all messed up

[Dyani]

Hi,

For the past week or two my internet browsers (safari and firefox) have been acting very strange. They are both constantly freezing (spinning wheel), which I can live with, but the worst part is that they both seem to be losing their internet connection all the time. I don't use safari a lot, but I use firefox every day. If I completely close the program (so, Quit Firefox) and then open it again it works fine for a couple of pages but then it starts just loading forever without something actually happening. If I close it, again it's fine for a couple of pages.

This all started happening after I downloaded Hotspot Shield and Freedur, both of which I uninstalled within an hour of installing. I can't find any residuals of these program.

In Firefox my search history has also been almost completely deleted and for some reason the suggestions in Google and Youtube have been turned off.

I don't have any extra add-ons or plug-ins.

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[Maeght]

I'm having the same problems. I've lost all history data in Firefox, it keeps freezing or taking ages to load if I have more than about 5 tabs open or am trying to play vids. Airport keeps dropping out also, and then after about 15minutes seems to accept the signal again.

I've checked private history settings etc but they are not activated. Should I reinstall Firefox or something? Driving me nuts...

 

[Chappers]

What version of macosx are you using - if its 10.5 - have you updated it to 10.5.8. If you haven't - then you should.

You could try repairing permissions - always worth a try.
10.5 shouldn't need this but .................. I tend to run something like iceclean and run all tasks from one of its drop down menus (get it from www.versiontracker.com )

 

[Maeght]

Thanks Chappers. These are all pretty obvious things...that I of course hadn't bothered to check. Thanks

I'm still on os x 10.4.11 so will wait for 10.6 to come out next month before upgrading.

Have re-downloaded and re-installed Firefox (3.5.2) and it seems to have fixed about 95% of the issues. Still freezes up but pretty rarely and Airport hasn't dropped out since (which was about 20hours ago).

Thanks again. I notice there have been some useful Airport related changes made in 10.5.... something I should have thought of I guess.