FF 46 Locking Ubuntu 14.04

Frustrating, isn't it? I, too, have recently experienced FF 46 locking up, or at least slowing down to the point of being almost unusable, both on Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04.

I can't remember exactly what I did on Ubuntu, but it included the clearing the cache, tuing off FF's sync, and removing some unused addons.

On the Windows machine, I was going to reinstall, but the FF download page offered to "refresh" Firefox instead: doing so seems to have helped. I'm not exactly sure what the "refresh" did, my best guess is that it did something along the lines of creating a new profile, with the old profile data being placed in a folder on my desktop. It meant having to reinstall one or two addons that I find useful, but the few minutes doing that was better than having to deal with unwanted side-effects that can happen if you throw your laptop across the room in frustration.