Firefox Crash
 

Hi I don't know whether this is the right place to put this but here goes.

I have just updated from Ubuntu dapper to edgy 6.10 and though things have gone really well with that I have a problem that firefox2 keeps crashing. Having had a look around there several questions on this saying that the Flash plugin causes it. Well I removed that and guess what? Firefox2 still crashes. It seems to be totally random, when you access a page Firefox2 just disappears??? and you have to restart it, annoying! Does anyone have any ideas or is this a feature!

Adrian

Run Firefox from the command line. That way when it crashes, it *should* spit out some error messages.

Well I tried this but got nothing at the cmd prompt. Any other ideas, by the way I can get it to happen if I goto www.adode.com which must have some flash on it.

Try looking at the page about:plugins. Maybe you have more than one flash player installed and that's causing problems?

Are you using a theme for firefox? I had a similar problem when I was using a theme. The theme wasn't created correctly and would crash firefox if I tried to open pages with flash, or I tried to view a streaming video. It also would crash if I went to a certain tab in the prefs. The immediate fix is to use the default theme for firefox.

Try to see if it comes from your firefox setup:
mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla-old
and then restart firefox

Also have a look at ~/.xsession-errors

So I copied the flash plugin to a old directory under .mozilla, and guess what, firefox no longer crashes, so if I am happy to live without flash for a while, every thing is ok. I guess this a bug in the flash plugin, should I raise it as a bug? I have no idea how to do this?

Firefox 2.x has a serious memory leak that causes this. I found on MozillaZine how to workaround it. It's here

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_hangs

Specifically, the section labeled "Hang after prolonged or extensive use"

Follow the suggestions for reducing memory usage.

I have tried to deal with the memory and for a while things got better, however now firefox is crashing really badly nearly every page, In fact it is so bad that I have had to move to Opera, which is s shame because I really liked firefox. Has anyone else had this problem? Is there anyway to get around it? I would really like to get back to firefox and all my bookmarks!

Your bookmarks are easy to find. They'll be in ~/.mozilla/firefox/<random>.default/bookmarks.html, where <random> is a string of random characters. I'm not sure if Opera will read the same format, but it shouldn't be too difficult to extract your bookmarks from the file.

Personally I haven't experienced this memory leak. You could try uninstalling Firefox and all its plugins, and then reinstalling (after backing up your bookmarks, of course).

Any technical details? Error messages, did you try to move your .mozilla? Have you compiled mozilla yourself?

Hi

Sorry I haven't replied to this earlyer but I have been away. There are no technical details other than I am using ubuntu 6.10 "EDGY" the version of firefox is version 2.0.0.1. The crash has started happining when I upgraded Ubuntu 6.04 and firefox 1.5. The crash seems to always happen first started when I went to http://www.linuxquestions.org/ also it happens for sure on the following website http://www.kmxkarts.co.uk/kmxexperience there are lots of other sites that do it aswell. At first I thought it was just the flash plugin so I removed it, but it still does it. I have also tried removing it, also removing all trace's, then reinstalling but that also did not do it. Has anyone got any other ideas?

Have you looked at about:plugins yet? Anything odd in there?

What is "about:plugin"? I am fairly new on Linux so you will have to bear with me!

about:plugins is not a Linux only thing, it also works in Windows and also (presumably) Mac. Just type it into the address bar of your browser (without any http:// etc on the beginning) and it will list all the plugins that the browser finds. It's possible that it's picking up some other broken version of a flash plugin, which is causing the crashes. If so, the plugin will show up on that page.