Firefox crashes on logout

[Mike Jing]

Every time I logout or shutdown the system with firefox open, it will generate a crash report in about:crashes. However, there is no crash dump in /var/crash.

I noticed this before I upgraded from 18.04 LTS recently, and at first I thought the crash went away after the upgrade, but sadly it's not the case.

I've tested with a fresh new user, with the same result. I'm running Xubuntu 20.04.1 LTS.

This may be the same bug as bug #73536 ( Mozilla Bugzilla #336193), but I can't be sure.

To reproduce:

Open firefox. Logout with firefox window open. login again and check "about:crashes" in firefox.

The output of:

lsb_release -a; uname -a; apt-cache policy firefox

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS
Release: 20.04
Codename: focal
Linux celia 5.4.0-42-generic #46-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 10 00:24:02 UTC 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
firefox:
  Installed: 79.0+build1-0ubuntu0.20.04.1
  Candidate: 79.0+build1-0ubuntu0.20.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 79.0+build1-0ubuntu0.20.04.1 500
        500 http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu focal-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu focal-security/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     75.0+build3-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu focal/main amd64 Packages

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I cannot reproduce the problem is a stock GNOME session (neither by logging out nor by abruptly killing the firefox process). I wonder whether this is XFCE-specific?

[Mike Jing (zzjing)]

I just checked it with a fresh install of Xubuntu 20.04.01 on a different machine, and I cannot reproduce the problem. I went back and checked it again on my main computer, and the bug went away! The last crash was two days ago on 2020-08-27, and now it doesn't crash anymore when I logout or shutdown. It seems that it has been fixed in firefox 80.0.

apt-cache policy firefox

firefox:
  Installed: 80.0+build2-0ubuntu0.20.04.1
  Candidate: 80.0+build2-0ubuntu0.20.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 80.0+build2-0ubuntu0.20.04.1 500
        500 http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu focal-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu focal-security/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     75.0+build3-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu focal/main amd64 Packages

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Thanks for following up!