Firefox stops responding, and claims to be running even after killing it by xkill

[Jarno Suni]

I had many tabs open, I could not be very specific. I used xkill to kill Firefox. However, if I try to restart firefox, I get the following dialog:

"Close Firefox

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close existing Firefox process, or restart your system."

I might be able to give you some valuable information, if you tell me promptly how. I am writing this by Opera and have not restarted my system yet.

Synaptic tells me I have version 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.5-0u

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

ps -aef showed there were process "/usr/lib/firefox-bin -a firefox"
I killed it and after that I could restart FF. I wonder why xkill did not kill Firefox, although it removed all Firefox's windows from desktop.

I am using Xubuntu Dapper.

[Dave Brady (matter-grey)]

Confirming. I get this a whole lot, and I actually have a launcher in my taskbar that specifically kills firefox (killall -9 firefox-bin), as Firefox tends to die on me A LOT.

[Kai Kasurinen (kai-kasurinen)]

Thanks for your comments. This does not appear to be a bug report as
such. We appreciate the difficulties you are facing, but it would
make more sense to raise your question at
http://launchpad.net/support.

man xkill tells:

"Xkill is a utility for forcing the X server to close connections to clients. This program is very dangerous, but is useful for aborting programs that have displayed undesired windows on a user’s screen."

"This command does not provide any warranty that the application whose connection to the X server is closed will abort nicely, or even abort at all. All this command does is to
close the connection to the X server. Many existing applications do indeed abort when their connection to the X server is closed, but some can choose to continue."