I gave up on FF a couple of years ago for the very same reasons you are describing. There is something under the hood that automatically updates and adds new tool bars and other junk and this is after I set Update to manual only. So, can't really give you any tips as FF went the way of the Dinosaur for me. Also, FF was and most likely still is....a CPU hog. It would get sluggish very fast. Pages would take for ever to load.