Firefox ... and crashing

[robgul]

Is it me ? - FF  (on a fast-ish XP machine and 8Mb BBand) has started to crash with some regularity.

The version is the absolute latest in terms of updates (i.e. TODAY) ... it shows a message that says (to the effect of)  "Sorry it's crashed ... probably something to do with your tabs"   

Seldom more than 2 tabs open ... the one thing that MAY be a cause is clicking a link before the complete screen has painted (i.e. not completely arrived from the server) - but that's not happened before

There also seems to be a slight delay, that causes an error message when FF is closed and then opened again immediately.

I'd be interested in any other FF crash experiences

Rob

[Mike J]

What version are you on?

There also seems to be a slight delay, that causes an error message when FF is closed and then opened again immediately.

Is this the "firefox is already running" one?

[pcolbeck]

No it's rock solid for me. I'm using 3.5.2 on XP. You aren't running one of the betas are you ?

[hellymedic]

My Firefox seemed to be 'overwhelmed' today. I think the computer was overwhelmed really. Windows was sneaking in an automatic update at the same time as the AV software ran a scan and I had many FF tabs open.
Things were better after I restarted the computer (which took ages).

[TimO]

Sometimes it's not the applications per-se, it's code on the website.  I've certainly had some websites which repeatedly crash.  For some reason the TFL Travel Info page was causing the oldish version of Firefox on this EeePC to lock up with 98%+ CPU usage.  The only solution was to shutdown Firefox entirely, and restart it without reloading the pages open at the time.  The newer version 3 FF on the XP laptop was fine with it.

Arguably Firefox should be able to survive and ignore bad code in a page, but it's not directly the applications fault, and it's pretty difficult to allow for all possible issues.

[Bledlow]

I had a problem with Firefox recently, after an AVG anti-virus update. It was hanging up, freezing for no apparent reason. Known problem with that AVG release, apparently. I changed my AV software & the problem immediately went away.

[bikesdontfloat]

I'm finding that Bitdefender is also causing crashes with the latest incarnation of FF.  I've had a number of crashes and the report mentions some Bitdefender gubbins every time.

[sas]

Arguably Firefox should be able to survive and ignore bad code in a page, but it's not directly the applications fault, and it's pretty difficult to allow for all possible issues.

It's the fault of the application- failure to handle unexpected input is a major cause of security exploits. It doesn't have to successfully display a badly coded webpage, but it should at least recognise there's an issue and not crash.

[токамак]

I had a problem a couple of months ago on my work's XP box - Firefox would crash the whole system when trying to load a new web page. To fix it I uninstalled Firefox, downloaded the then current release (using IE) and installed it again from scratch. Problem hasn't reoccurred since.

[robgul]

What version are you on?

There also seems to be a slight delay, that causes an error message when FF is closed and then opened again immediately.

Is this the "firefox is already running" one?

Yes - it just seems to need more time than IE to "close down and open again" - no big deal, it's the crashes that are the annoying feature

Rob

[robgul]

Hmm, none the wiser - it certainly isn't the websites - the same sites may/may not crash FF.

Interestingly, looking back through the FF updates there was one last week that "addresses an issue with FF being very slow to open in Windows" ... maybe a connection?

... and the version I have is the latest stable with current updates, not a beta, it's 3.5.2

Thanks, so far ...

Rob

[Mike J]

Interestingly, looking back through the FF updates there was one last week that "addresses an issue with FF being very slow to open in Windows" ... maybe a connection?

... and the version I have is the latest stable with current updates, not a beta, it's 3.5.2

Thanks, so far ...

Rob

That's the one I have, it's much faster starting up but still gives the closing down error when it's closed and restarted.

[Mr Larrington]

3.5.2 & XP Pro here - Firefox sometimes hangs.  Killing the process with Task Mangler sometimes helps but equally often, FF won't restart, meaning a resort to the Three-Fingered Salute and a lot of swearing, as it can take up to twenty minutes to reboot and restart all the applications I tend to have open chiz.