firefox extremely crash-happy, especially when flash video is involved

[Robert Persson]

Binary package hint: firefox-3.5

Yesterday I found that Firefox had suddenly become very crash-prone. I have found this on my default profile, which is very heavily laden with extensions etc, on a clean profile, and when logged in on the clean profile of a fictitious user I keep for troubleshooting purposes. Perhaps it is a little bit worse on my normal account, but I'm not certain.

I can't say exactly what triggers the crashes, but I can confidently induce a crash within 30 seconds at http://koreus.com. This will often be when I click on the Flashblock's placeholders where the movies should be (i.e. when I tell tell the browser to load Flash., but sometimes I simply have to click on a link to another page. I have noticed that even though Flash movies always seem to trigger crashes, Flash animations appear not to. In general, pages with lots of new-fangled doodley bits, such as Flash movies, are very prone to crash, whereas more traditional pages, such as those at launchpad.net, are more stable.

The issue described in this report does not afflict Goggle Chrome at all.

I am attaching a back trace according to the instructions on the Ubuntu wiki.

I am also attaching my apt log for the period including the day this problem started, i.e. 27 February. The only things I am aware of doing that might have caused something to go wrong for all users is to have installed some software. This would have been well before the time I upgraded Firefox to 3.5.8.(relatively late on 27th February). I can't remember whether it was before or after I installed Pidgin and all its dependencies.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Feb 28 03:50:36 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
Package: firefox 3.5.8+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.10.1
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: firefox-3.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.31.6-rt19 x86_64

[Robert Persson (ireneshusband)]

Update:

I found that the crashes stopped happening when I removed the Flash plugin. I had installed the 64-bit pre-release plugin from http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/64bit.html because the bugs in the 32-bit version were causing problems. However this was months ago, yet it was only yesterday that I started experiencing any stability problems with it. For now I've gone back and installed the 32-bit version via apt-get. It seems to be usable for the moment.

I should also add that I have been running BBC iPlayer in Prism (from the Ubuntu repositories), and I have had poor stability, but nothing remotely as bad as I was having yesterday in Firefox. Only rarely did this iPlayer Prism actually crash as such.