Occasionally, Firefox will crash (on my Fedora Core 10 box) without warning. I click on a link, and it just dies. Has anyone else experienced this?
[Thursday morning update]
Well, it just did it again, and completely out of the blue. I was just reading a page, not even clicking on anything, when it vanished without a trace.
Also, has anyone else noticed that, on startup, it runs like molasses and saturates the CPU, until one kills off npviewer?
[Bumped]
Same thing happening to me with increasing frequency. But usually after it dies, a window appears requesting that I inform Firefox of the circumstances during which it failed. Usually I just click on send and transmit the fact of the failure.
Yes indeed. Happened to me just this morning. I had several tabs open, and when FF restarted, it tried to reload all those tabs. When it got to the one that had crashed, it crashed again.
I don’t even get the crash Window, Bill. It just disappears.
This doesn’t seem to be a problem with any particular tab. When I reload, it’s find for a while, maybe a day or two, and then it randomly does it again when I click on a link, sometimes just checking email.
What do you mean “anyone else,” Kemosabe? There are probably a bazillion “FF crashed” bugs at Bugzilla. If you want to be special, you need to join a sub-clique, like “my FF crashes whenever I load a page containing a Flash animation that makes fun of Barack Obama and uses the word ‘antlers.'”
That should be sufficient to get you only 500 yes me too! replies to your query.
Anyway, on a Unix kernel the application normally crashes without warning through a segfault, which could be the browser or could be any number of plugins that operate through it, Java and Flash being among the most common culprits. You can sometimes eliminate the problem by turning off both.
Generically speaking these are memory management problems, e.g. FF released some chunk of memory, forgot it did so, then tries to re-access it — bzzt! segfault — so to some extent you can avoid them by restarting FF frequently, since that clears the stack and has it start allocating from scratch. This is not a bad idea in general, as FF has such crappy memory management it usually manages to suck up 100 Mb after a day or so of running, which is absurd.
Long term, the solution is to hunt down everyone who thought the browser should function like a tiny operating system and have them shot, then buried at midnight in secret graves.
I’ve had it crash a couple of times and freeze many times on my Ubuntu laptop. Then I installed Adblock Plus and blocked out as many things I could without rendering every web page blank. (On some sites I have to block images including header and background images.) Now it works pretty well. Still, I’d like another browser for Linux that runs faster. Do they make Lynx for Linux? (Not entirely a j/k.)
I am intrigued by your program and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Hmmm. I’ve never had that problem with my copy of FF 3.0.10, but then I’m using Windoze XP. 😉
I have had problems with memory, but only when I leave the browser pointed to a site with a lot of fancy javascript stuff going on, for several hours. Usually the first notice I get while I’m busy doing something is a little pop-up from XP saying it was temporarily increasing virtual memory, which was running low.
Pointing the browser away from the offending site generally fixes things, if not immediately.
Andrea, since Lynx was originally written for Unix and VMS, I don’t doubt there’s a version available for your distro. It may even be already installed on your system.
If you search Wiki for “lynx browser” you’ll find some interesting stuff, including links to “Links,” (heh) a text-based browser with pull-down menus, w3m someone similar to Links, and ELinks. You might find one of them quite enjoyable.
Reading the Wiki page reminded me that there’s an MS-DOS version available as well, if you want to use an older machine to cruise the Web. I doubt anything older than a i386 would be usable (considering network driver requirements), but it might be fun. It’s amazing what you can still accomplish with older machines, as long as you don’t want to watch DVDs. 🙂
Do they make Lynx for Linux?
But of course. Since you’re using Ubuntu, nothing could be easier. Fire up synaptic and do a search on “text browser” and you’ll find lynx itself, as well as links and elinks, which are similar options.
…FWIW Firefox has done this to me since I switched over to it a couple years back, and successive upgrades have made the problem worse, not better.
Yes, I’ve experienced that too – FF 3.x, Fefora 10 and also Nvidia graphics card & driver (which seems to be implicated).
What I’ve heard is that it is a problem with that driver, separate from the memory management problems known to be in FF.
Get the session manager extension from the add-ins page to recover your previous session.
I usually can get Firefox to crash to desktop (ctd) on my Ubuntu box when I have about 50 or 60 tabs open. I put the power in power-user. It seems that FF version 3 in Windows XP has become fairly stable, much more so than in Ubuntu that is for sure. I’ve dual booted WinXp w/Ubuntu on same machine. WinXP SP3 is starting to become a fairly stable platform IMHO. I even run it no problem on older Dell Latitude CPx PIII 650 mhz, 512 MB ram, and ATI graphics adapter. It chugs out web pages and email fairly well as long as you don’t tax the memory bus too heavily, i.e click on links like an ADD afflicted turrets boy drinking a coke.
Long term, the solution is to hunt down everyone who thought the browser should function like a tiny operating system and have them shot, then buried at midnight in secret graves. – LOL
I use firefox because I like the features, but it’s as unstable as, well, a fox on fire. As well as being ungodly slow to start and crash-prone, it also doesn’t handle FTP links, which is a pet peeve of mine because the netdrive I bought doesn’t do http. Lately, it’s developed this habit of locking up when I try to start a photo upload on facebook. Happens about 1 out of 3 times — annoying as hell. But, I’ll give them credit for adding the feature where on startup it notices that it just crashed and offers to restore your last session. Considering how often that happens, it’s a real time-saver!
I used to have a spontaneous crash problem in Windows XP using earlier 3.x versions of Firefox but that problem has disappeared since probably about 3.0.6
Haven’t had Firefox crash for me in Ubuntu ever.
Ok, I’ll instigate. I’m surprised that the XP version would seem to have better memory-management than the Linux version, and -no- I’m not being snarky. 🙂
I always expect that would be a systems-level call, but apparently it is platform (and compiler) dependent…
Perhaps Linux compilers depend too much on the superior platform? Just asking… 🙂
since 3 days I work with Firefox, replacing Netscape 7. All works well, with the exception of downloads. The download- manager opens and after a while reaches a deadlock. The only thing I can do is ctrl-Alt-Del. In the Headerline I can see the meassage PS: 603.3 MB. There seems to be no way to cancel downloads! Even saving files to my harddisk does no work, because of this deadlock of the downloadmanager! What can be the reason, please?