This morning I was using Firefox with about a dozen tabs open when my computer locked up. It froze and was completely unresponsive – basically DOA. I decided to reboot the system, and everything was working fine until I reopened Firefox. It loaded my previous session, and the computer locked up again. After a second reboot, I opened Firefox and decided to start a new session and so far everything has been running smoothly.
I’m not sure why my system does this, but it’s getting pretty damn annoying. More importantly, the fact that these crashes are forcing me to reboot is really getting on my nerves. While I didn’t have anything important open, in the next few days I’m going to be using R through the terminal, and there’s a chance that a crash like this could lose me a significant amount of work, particularly since R doesn’t have a restore capability like my other programs.
I’m also hesitant to blame Firefox for what’s going on since this has also happened in Thunderbird and in Pidgin. Hopefully I can figure out what’s going on soon – Linux Mint has been pretty fantastic, and this has really put a damper on my experience. Is there any sort of error log I can look at? Ideally I want to be able to replicate the conditions before the crash to see if I can isolate any causes.
You might want to look in your Firefox Plugins, for some reason at one point I had both Flash 9 and Flash 10 installed and it would take down the entire computer when the webpage tried to load flash.
There are often error logs that keep track of major errors like this, although a quick web search tells me that firefox doesn’t seem to write them out anywhere. I know that in Iceweasel (essentially the same thing), I can view the current error logs under Tools >> Error Console, although that doesn’t help much after a crash. Basically, search around the web and see if anybody is having a similar problem. One suggestion that I did see that sounds reasonable is to nuke the .mozilla folder in your home directory. This could reset some corrupted config files or something, although it sounds like a long shot
While this thread doesn’t look particularly promising, I’ve had some great results with advice taken from the Ubuntu forums. They seem to actually give a shit about their users over there 😛
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1100823
I’m having more and more problems with stuff like this as well, and its not always limited to just one task. Primarily though Firefox likes to lock up every time I have to use the JVM.