Unprovoked shutdowns of Firefox

[shanen (Shannon Jacobs)]

Actually my search led me to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.5/+bug/612131 from many years ago, and I was not amused to see how much of it is still quite applicable so many years later. Even less amusing is that it appears the bug remains open. But I'm hoping this is a new version, eh?

Main symptom is an immediate shutdown of Firefox. Usually the restart succeeds, though the other day it happened a second time. Sometimes it crashes Ubuntu, too, causing a complete restart.

Since I didn't spot any recent matches in the bugs, I suspect my situation may be unusual, and the most likely peculiarity is that I'm running in Oracle's VirtualBox. However, the problems have definitely become worse with the new version of 23.04 version of Ubuntu.

I strongly suspect the newly divided update system is part of the problem. Fairly often there are updates on the Updates tab, but no can update. Two of them right now, gnome and core, but "snap has no updates available" is the response when Update is clicked.

And this is why I feel so weakly motivated to use Ubuntu for any production work... But Firefox has plenty of discouraging problems, too.

[Amin Bandali (bandali)]

Hello, and sorry for the delayed reply here.

Abrupt shutdown definitely sounds like a Firefox bug, and could be due to a long list of things.

Are you still able to reproduce this issue on a current release of Ubuntu such as Ubuntu 24.04 and with latest versions of Firefox? If so, would you please provide a list of steps to reproduce the issue? Ideally with the addresses for some web pages that make your browser crash.

Also, please consider reporting this issue on Mozilla's bug tracker at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org and provide a link here for reference?

Thank you.

[shanen (Shannon Jacobs) (shanen)]

Thanks for asking, but a year later? Some sort of anniversary celebration? I don't even remember what that bug was about. The new problem is that Firefox just fails to show up... But I'm pretty sure it isn't the firefox package, but one of the lower-level display packages.

When I "upgraded" to Numbat things got much worse than with the previous version, where the main problems were just cursor things. I spent a while trying to report the new problems, but eventually gave up and settled for tedious workarounds. The worst new problem appears to involve initialization of the virtual displays. If the initialization succeeds, which happens rarely, then everything is okay. If not, then I have developed a long serious of workarounds. Sparing you the details, but it starts with <Ctrl><Alt><F1> to get a new window where I can resize in two steps... If that doesn't work...

Nothing I can recommend to anyone who doesn't have a hacking background. I see it as a kind of mental exercise, but not a system that I could use or recommend for anything serious.

Mozilla has other problems, but I think the main one remains the financial model. The things Mozilla implements are NOT things I want, but there is no way to donate for the features I actually do want. Unable to remember the last time anything in Firefox changed in a way that I would have been glad to have contributed to the change...

[Amin Bandali (bandali)]

I did apologize for the late reply...

Without further details such as detailed logs I'm afraid there's not much we could do to try and track that issue down. For what it's worth, in the recent years I have not run into the issues of Firefox shutting down abruptly or failing to launch.

About the general state of computing and software, including Mozilla's Firefox, I share some of the frustration, but I'm afraid there's not much I could do to improve the situation overnight (certainly not the non-technical aspects that are far beyond my control), except to keep chipping away at the various issues one small problem at a time, and working towards improving the general state of things.

If you can and would like to, reporting these bugs on upstream's tracker at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org with accompanying logs would be helpful in documenting them and gathering details about them, which might then help Mozilla developers debug and resolve them. And for issues relating to the other aspects of the operating system or integration of Firefox into Ubuntu you're welcome to report them here on Launchpad.