Still crash unattended? [LWN.net]

Still crash unattended?

Posted Nov 8, 2011 22:19 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
Parent article: Firefox 8 released

The most salient feature of 7 is that it only crashes when I haven't used it for a couple of days. Every Monday, I restart it, and it runs through Friday without hiccups, and then crashes over the weekend when I'm not here. I guess I could think of it as GC that actually works; this way its RSS rarely goes much over 2G. If it would only put its windows back on the right desktops on a restore, I would count that as success.

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Still crash unattended?

Posted Nov 8, 2011 22:42 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

I'm now running the 9 alpha, but I ran the 7 beta for several weeks before migrating and didn't have any crashing problems. before that (on 6) I was having firefox killed by the OOM killer on a frequent basis, check that you aren't having a problem along those lines.

Still crash unattended?

Posted Nov 9, 2011 3:15 UTC (Wed) by set (guest, #4788) [Link]

Firefox was getting killed by the OOM killer for me at random intervals ranging from days to weeks of uptime. I upgraded to version 6 and it seemed to get worse. I ended up moving my ~/.mozilla directory aside, starting fresh and the memory gobbling stopped. Then I migrated the custom settings I had made under ~/.mozilla that I still understood, and it has remained stable ever since. I cannot even guess how many years and incarnations of mozilla browsers had been using that, or what could possibly have been causing the problem, but I am back to my normal usage; 12-20 tabs open running continuously.

Still crash unattended?

Posted Nov 9, 2011 6:13 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

I believe OOM sends a SIGKILL, while firefox is getting SIGSEGV. But I'll try set's suggestion; .mozilla on this box goes back (only!) five years. Firefox is running under gdb this week, so on Monday we'll know more -- unless gdb crashes first.

Firefox stability

Posted Nov 9, 2011 10:48 UTC (Wed) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

I used to have very frequent crashes on Linux, and a bug where the IFRAME popped out into a window - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263160 - which made it almost unusable on Linux.

These issues went away some time ago and Firefox now seems as stable on Linux as it is on Windows. I like that the latest Firefox still works on older Linux distros (Ubuntu 8.04), as does Opera - Chrome says 'your OS is unsupported' and refuses to upgrade itself.

I did find that Firefox 8 doesn't properly reload tabs when the new 'only load tabs when selected' feature is turned on (using Windows) so that seems a bit buggy still.