firefox freezes

[davidpbrown]

... Firefox freezing Ubuntu forcing reboot

I've just had Firefox freezing Ubuntu x10 in a row! The whole system locks up and is unresponsive.. mouse cursor is frozen and keyboard unresponsive.. I guess the windows manager crashes.

I've seen other more specific bug reports but I can't relate to them. The only unique thing I have here is AMD64 and maybe that I click links before pages are fully loaded.

There's no obvious consistency is the cause or timing.. though it's always just as a link is clicked. Twice was at gnome-look.org wallpapers, resorting by most downloaded but this has happened often on other sites.. rebooting and returning in the same way to the same page doesn't freeze up. This last hour the most frequently by far. Last time was clicking the registration link from the email from this site.. almost put me off.

I'm new to Linux so don't know the best way to capture useful data on this. Java not running, Javascript is enabled and certainly the sites it happens on are the type to use it and the links that cause it may well be javascripted (guess).

Serious bug.. I'll look for another browser till it's fixed..

[Hilario J. Montoliu (hjmf) (hmontoliu)]

Thank you davidpbrown for submitting this report.

Could you please try to obtain a backtrace by following the instructions on
[1], or upload the crash report that probably was generated during the crash
and that should be located at /var/crash/ to [2].

Please indicate which extensions/plugins do you have enabled; and if this crash
is reproducible describe the steps that lead to it (it is very important for us
to have a test case for each crash).

This will greatly aid us in tracking down your problem.

Thanks in advance.

H. Montoliu

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Bugs
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/117078/+addcomment

[davidpbrown (davidpbrown)]

Thanks Hilario

There is no crash report in /var/crash and I have only NoScript as an addon.

However, trying again, I have reproduced this now three times today but as before with a slight inconsistency.

It seems to occur when a page change is requested from a partly downloaded page.

Reproduced here by going to Google search "Ubuntu themes" + choose the Wallpapers from the list
http://www.gnome-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=170x171x172x173x174

then either before that page has fully loaded switch to "Most downloads" or click another tab and then change tab before half way through the page load. Mouse cursor will still move but unresponsive.. moving off the Firefox browser doesn't fall back to another window, as above, keyboard unresponsive to shutdown quits etc.

I had to clear cache to reproduce the third time..

If there is a about:command or other firefox diagnostic and logs that might help, let me know.

[davidpbrown (davidpbrown)]

I've just found that the frozen state is retained if you reboot and on Firefox open "Restore Session" rather than starting new one, it jumps back into the frozen state as if reboot never happened. Might help running tests on what that retained state is??

[Hilario J. Montoliu (hjmf) (hmontoliu)]

Davidpbrown thank you for your feedback,

Maybe an strace might help to show some light (I'm not able to reproduce
it). Would you please start firefox as always, and from an xterm run:

~$ strace -p $(pidof firefox-bin) 2>&1 | tee strace.out

then force the freeze and upload the resulting "strace.out" file to [1]?

Thank you in advance.

[1]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/117078/+addcomment
--
Hilario J. Montoliu <email address hidden>

[davidpbrown (davidpbrown)]

strace attached..

[Hilario J. Montoliu (hjmf) (hmontoliu)]

El lun, 28-05-2007 a las 21:27 +0000, davidpbrown escribió:
> strace attached..

Thank you for your quick feedback.

Would you mind to try to reproduce this issue with a fresh profile? e.g.
back up your old profile as:

mv /home/davidpbrown/.mozilla /home/davidpbrown/OLD_MOZILLA_DIR

then start firefox and see if the freeze happens again.

If you want later to restore your old settings do:

rm -fr /home/davidpbrown/.mozilla
mv /home/davidpbrown/OLD_MOZILLA_DIR /home/davidpbrown/.mozilla

[davidpbrown (davidpbrown)]

Done with no change - it still freezes up.

Incidentally the side affect of so many hard reboots is naturally a fair number of fsck errors including some manual ones - bit scary for a noob to walk through :)

I wonder if reinstalling firefox might work.. won't do it till you suggest but am surprised that Ubuntu can be frozen, however it's being done.

[davidpbrown (davidpbrown)]

jinxed.. doh

From force of habit I used Firefox again and it crashed leaving grub corrupt!

That Ubuntu's grub reinstall isn't simple meant I just had to completely reinstall Ubuntu.. that is fresh /, /usr, swap, /tmp, /var. I've now reinstalled all packages and settings so am back to where I was.

I thought that would kill it but the bug remains!

So having determined it's not the Mozilla profile and not the Ubuntu install, what next?

[Hilario J. Montoliu (hjmf) (hmontoliu)]

... sad to hear that. Could it be a hardware problem?

[davidpbrown (davidpbrown)]

I've no reason to think it is.. I've only seen it with Firefox recently past few weeks. It's been a very stable system for the two years I've had it.
I think it's something specific to the coding on the pages I go to that trips it. I've visited other sites and had no problems.
I'll steer clear of the known problem pages for now and see whether I see it again..

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 06:23:48AM -0000, davidpbrown wrote:
> I've no reason to think it is.. I've only seen it with Firefox recently past few weeks. It's been a very stable system for the two years I've had it.
> I think it's something specific to the coding on the pages I go to that trips it. I've visited other sites and had no problems.
> I'll steer clear of the known problem pages for now and see whether I see it again..
>

Try to start firefox in safe-mode:

 # firefox -safe-mode

and let us know if the bug disappears.

 - Alexander

[davidpbrown (davidpbrown)]

yes it's still there in safe-mode

[Gias Kay Lee (gsklee)]

The bug's still here - if you attempt to open a new link before the current page is fully loaded, sometimes, this will lead to a total system freeze. The cursor is still movable but nothing else. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace won't work, even Alt+SysRq+R/E/I/S/U/B won't budge! A hard reboot is always required whenever this happens for me. Highly unhealthy for my computer... bug should be given a higher priority.

[davidpbrown (davidpbrown)]

This bug from 2007 - I never did resolve this.. a few weeks later I had what I took to be hardware problems, switched out both memory and motherboard and still couldn't get a clean boot. Now on another base, I've not seen this bug again.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

vlosing due to your above comment

[sword_guy (sword-guy)]

I don't know if this helps, but I have a similar problem, except with mine the cursor won't even move. I had this problem with Firefox 3 so I downgraded to 2. Everything worked fine until recently. I changed my video card from a Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 to an ATI Radeon 9600. The problem didn't come back until a couple days later. It seems to happen on pages with some sort of flash. I've never had a flash video run very well, but I've heard that it's because there's no good flash player for Ubuntu yet. Also, it doesn't happen all the time on the same pages. But when it happens, it just stops. There is no recovery for it except turning the computer off and on. Another thing I should add is that when it used to happen, and the computer did its drive check from unclean shutdown, sometimes there would be an xserver problem. It would always make its way through it (I forgot the exact errors and what I had to do to fix it). I just thought of something else. I also uninstalled the drivers for the Nvidia card today. I haven't had the problem until today. Maybe it needed those for something even though the card is missing? That's all I have. I see the post above this says fix released, but there's nothing else on that. Where is the fix?

[sword_guy (sword-guy)]

I ran it from terminal, and this error popped up twice. Maybe this has something to do with it:

(gecko:6549): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_destroy: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

[Kevin Burrell (kjburrell)]

Sorry I don't have any useful data to add to this, but I have recently seen this problem also on a notebook. I had been running 8.10 for some time and recently upgraded to 9.04, and this problem existed in both releases, however seemingly more and more often these days, but not tied to the upgrade, Seems to be happening multiple times a day now.

Symptoms were best described as non responsive window manager; ie I could move the mouse but clicking did not do anything

I have to force a shutdown using alt ctrl del and wait for the auto shutdown to take place, I think sometime ago I could fix by alt ctrl backspace, but no longer. Also a long time back right clicking on the web page and going back would fix, but no longer. I'm not sure what series of events causes this,

This laptop has only 500mb ram also.

I've started using Opera today and so far not seen any lockups. I have never seen this on my 8.04 desktop system or any other ubuntu releases I have used. It does seem to be tied to this latitude D600

[sword_guy (sword-guy)]

Okay, one last thing from me to try. Use the open source graphics drivers. Disable the proprietary drivers and see what happens. I did this with mine, and it seems to be working fine so far. And the best part, my video files play smoothly now! I haven't tested it on flash videos yet, but hopefully it makes those better also. That's a completely different bug though... Also, I've been running PCSX, and it seems to run the same with either graphics driver. Actually...I'd say it runs better with the open source drivers. This is with my ATI Radeon 9600. Well then...I've begun to ramble. Good luck!

[eissc (eissc)]

I was having the same problem when I first installed 9.04 on a Toshiba Satellite R15-s822 laptop. While using Firefox, Ubuntu would freeze up. Sometimes I could move the cursor, but other times it would freeze too.

I don't remember where I found this info, but here's what I did to fix this issue almost 100% of the time:

Go to System > Preferences > Appearance > "Visual Effects" tab

Select "None" (the default was "Normal")

Click on the "Close" button

I hope this helps.

[David S. (uals32843)]

I followed eissc's procedures, disabled "Visual Effects",

System > Preferences > Appearance > "Visual Effects" Select "None"

then this freeze issue is gone. Wonderful!

I tried many methods, asked many people on the Internet, the bug is always there. Until I saw this post...

[trevi (ermin-trevisan)]

This bug affects me too. I'm using Xubuntu 10.04 AMD64 with Firefox 3.6.8
I can't use the workaround mentioned by eissc using "System > Preferences > Appearance > "Visual Effects"" because I can't find such a preference.

[Richard Burton (richard-s-burton)]

I'm new to Ubuntu and decided to try it out.
Very happy (Ready to trash XP) except my system hangs (only Alt+PrtSc+k could reboot or hard power down).
System Lenovo T42p, 1GB
Ubuntu10.10
Firefox 3.6.12

I'll try turning off visual effects and see if this works.

[ahmed mokhtar (a-mokhtar-1980)]

I had the same problem on Ubuntu 13.04, and it solved after I uninstalled unity-webapps-facebookapps and unity-webapps-youtube