I tend to use Chrome most of the time and it loads pretty much instantly.
But all other browsers on my system (Safari, IE and Firefox) take AGES to load. From clicking on the icon, it can take btween 2 - 5 minutes until the browser window opens.
My Win installation on this machine is about 4 years old, so generally launching is not as fast as it could be. But this is ridiculous!
A (growing) list of things I've tried:
I've tried un/reinstalling them and it makes no difference.
This has been happening for a couple of years - when I updated the IE version it made no difference.
I haven't enabled any proxy, as mentioned in this question.
I have tried disabling all add-ons / extensions, and that makes no difference.
I have tried making Firefox / IE my default browser - that made no difference.
I have also run a whole pile of anti-malware tools such as MBAM, JRT, ADWCleaner, ESET Online Scanner, and some more that I may have forgotten.
Since I first posted, @slayernoah made some good suggestions:
- Creating a new profile in Firefox (no difference)
- Running a portable version of Firefox (also no difference!)
I'm really curious as to why this might be. I've Googled it but don't see evidence of anyone else with this issue.
One thing that @GuitarPicker drew my attention to: it's only the first window opening that hangs. Once that is open, opening another window is almost immediate. I don't know what that means, but it seems relevant.
Any ideas?
Update
I have just used Process Monitor as suggested by @heavyd. I don't see anything obviously related going on there. But there are so very many things going on there I'm not sure I'd recognise a problem if I saw it.
I'll post them here for now, in case they offer a clue. If they turn out to be irrelevant to the problem I'll delete them later.
Images are v small on this actual post page - right click the image and select 'open image in new tab' to see in full glorious technicolor detail.
Immediately after pressing the launch icon I get entries like these:
Then 2 mins later, just before FF actually launches, I get these: