Firefox keeps crashing!

[cyrwyn]

I see Firefox 6.0.1 stalls for a few seconds on some websites and occasionally a dialog box pops up informing me that a javascript is causing a loading problem. It's beginning to act like Konqueror. No crashes or total lockups, though.

[Neo]

Here is the list of add-ons in FF:

Hi Neo,

The Plugins are - in the main - installed at the same time as Firefox and form a fundamental part of the browser (for good or bad)

If you have disabled some/all of them that could "potentially" cause problems as the site may be looking for them.

Another option would be to close Firefox and move your .mozilla folder somewhere safe.

Then when Firefox is next started it will create a brand new folder

Have you tried reinstalling the flash-player-plugin?

Are you running KWin or Compiz, and if so do they seem to work okay?

Okay it took me a while but I did reinstall Flash using Synaptic (I did a complete removal first).
I also renamed the .mozilla folder. 
I lost all of my bookmarks when I restarted FF but that's okay, all in the name of tracking down this bug.

Well guess what... FF crashed yet again!
I have noticed that it does not crash as often after FF updated to 6.0.2 but that was before I did the steps above.

Sometimes it just hangs my computer and have to do a hard reset, sometimes REISUB works.

I've had it crash with all of the Plugin's disabled, with all of the plugin's enabled, with some of them enabled and some of them disabled.

I'm stumped! 

I really like PCLinuxOS, but this daily crashing is very frustrating! 

I want my old rock solid stable system back!

Any help in overcoming this will be greatly appreciated!

[CaptainSarcastic]

Yesterday I was watching a video on Youtube and suddenly it stopped playing and a message in the video box popped up stating my flash plugin had crashed.
I even had Opera crash on me stating that there may be a potential problem with Flash.

I assume that Flash is fully up to date on your system?  If not, run Synaptic and make sure it is.  I'm further assuming that your Nvidia drivers are up to date.

In terms of pinning down whether this is hardware or software, do you have another operating system on this machine?  If not, could you do an install to a USB stick or external drive and see if you can replicate the crashes on a different install entirely?  Without pinning down whether you are dealing with a hardware or software problem you could conceivably just be beating your head on a wall.

Aside from the advice to reseat the card itself, I'd also suggest changing the power connection to it to try and rule a bad connector.  If memory serves 7900 cards usually took a standard 4-pin molex connector, which should make that fairly easy to do.  Also make sure you don't have any scorching or bad caps on the card itself, although this is a little more rare - usually if this happens the card won't work at all.

I'd also suggest running memtest on the machine just to try and rule out a memory glitch.

If you can replicate the crashes while running a different install and/or operating system then you have pretty much established you are dealing with a hardware problem. 

[DeBaas]

As I was suffering from lockups, mostly in FF where direct hardware access was used, after weeks I solved the problem, cleaning up my nVidia card, removing some glue with dust from the connection lines to the cards memory chips. It seams the dust/glue was interfering with the memory data streams. Before I already tried removing/reseating the card.

2cts
Ed

[Neo]

Okay, it's been a while but I wanted to make sure before providing an update, so here goes:

I cleaned my video card (without removing but I did press down real hard to make sure it was seated properly) at this time I noticed that I had two thick cables (I think they were internal usb cables) that were caught between the mobo and video card so I gently moved them out of the way.
This seemed to help reduce the frequency of the crashes but not eliminate them.

Around the same time this happened the FF 7.0 update was released.

It still crashed about once a day.

Then I decided to run BleachBit (not the root version - I've never run BleachBit before but from what I gather it's a general "cleaner" program akin to Norton).
Well it did clean up a hole lot of stuff including several add-on related items.
Now at this time FF 7.0.1 update was released.

Now I haven't FF crash on me in several days - Hooray!!!
I don't know if it was the 7.0.1 update or BleachBit or both that did the trick but FF seems to be working just fine now (knock on wood and I hope I didn't jinx things by posting this update)

I thought all was well until a few minutes ago, while I was typing a message my computer suddenly lost all power and rebooted (unfortunately this has happened before).

I am going to post that issue as a separate thread as I think it's hardware and not related to the FF issues I had been experiencing.

[Neo]

...FF seems to be working just fine now (knock on wood and I hope I didn't jinx things by posting this update)

Yup FF just crashed again     

[menotu]

...FF seems to be working just fine now (knock on wood and I hope I didn't jinx things by posting this update)

Yup FF just crashed again     

As mentioned in your other thread it could be hardware/power related issue especially as you've been overclocking by 20% for some time; unless you've got very good cooling this will, over time, take a toll on your system.

Have you tried removing the overclocking option and run at default settings?

[JNibski]

while I was typing a message my computer suddenly lost all power and rebooted (unfortunately this has happened before).

....Check all plugs, connections...etc..coming from power supply.  Clean all dust out....cpu fins, etc....cpu overheat circuit will do this also.
Check in BIOS if CPU OVERTEMP circuit is "enabled"...and at what temp?...
---overclock? it just "wears" things out...

JN

[kjpetrie]

And after a power loss or hard shutdown (NEVER do a hard reset on a running Linux system and make sure your bios is set not to boot when power is applied until you press the start button [or wake on Lan or some other start signal is given], so temporary power outages won't result in one), it is very important to boot into a livecd and run fsck on all you partitions. Partitions must not be mounted during fsck, which is why you must use a livecd to fsck the /.

Otherwise file system corruption is highly likely which will cause all sorts of malfunctions and possible permanent loss of data.

[veronicathecow]

Could be power supply spikes. Did you clean out PSU by blowing air through it? (Don't open up as the caps can keep a good charge on them for a long time)
Try a different PSU and a different graphics card that uses less power.

[Neo]

Hi All,
Well I tried cleaning out the case.
I opened it up and using a plastic hose vacuumed it clean (rather surprisingly there wasn't much dust).

I removed and reseated the video card and both sticks of RAM.

Unfortunately FF still crashes.

It can go for days without crashing or crash two to three times a day.
As a matter of fact the last time it crashed was just a few minutes ago when I was posting something on this forum.

I think I may try using another distro for a while just to rule out a software issue (I am not looking forward to using another distro, I love PCLinuxOS, but that will confirm whether or not it is a hardware issue).

By the way I did try running my computer without any overclock and it still crashed so I went back to overclocking.

Is there a simple way to test the power supply?
When I built this computer 5+ years ago I did get a power supply that was much, much greater than my needs, so I don't think it has been taxed at all by my usage (I'm not a gamer).

[menotu]

Have you tried Firefox 8 Neo ?  Tex posted a short while ago that it's been sent to the repos.

May or may not help - hopefully it does!

[Texstar]

Just so you know. The Firefox in our repository is not an internal build. It is the official tar.bz2 file that you download from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ simply extracted and packaged into a RPM.

Maybe you should move your .mozilla folder in home to .mozilla.bak and start with a clean profile to test.

[Neo]

Just so you know. The Firefox in our repository is not an internal build. It is the official tar.bz2 file that you download from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ simply extracted and packaged into a RPM.

Maybe you should move your .mozilla folder in home to .mozilla.bak and start with a clean profile to test.

Yup, I tried that a while ago and it still crashed.

[Neo]

Have you tried Firefox 8 Neo ?  Tex posted a short while ago that it's been sent to the repos.

May or may not help - hopefully it does!

I just downloaded it today... fingers crossed.