1582795 - I am forced to kill Firefox when Windows’s Open File dialog freezes

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Widget: Win32, enhancement)

Description

[Nathan Phillip Brink (binki)]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:70.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/70.0

Steps to reproduce:

I have some number of random applications installed which add Explorer extensions. The ones I know about are:

7-Zip
TortoiseHg
Citrix Sharefile
OneDrive

I also run Windows Insider.

If I click a file input (e.g., to upload a file to a webpage), I get an Open File dialog. Sometimes, that dialog itself freezes. It is not predictable, unsure how to reproduce it. But, when that happens, the Open File dialog itself is not responsive. I can see Firefox windows drawing themselves but cannot interact with them. And the Open File dialog, whether or not it is marked as “(Not Responding)”, does not let me interact with it. I cannot press OK or Cancel to close it. And trying to press the Close button doesn’t work (I think sometimes it gives me the option to kill Firefox if I use it).

So, to continue using Firefox, I go through with closing that window and telling windows I want to close the program.

Actual results:

Having Windows forcibly kill the process that opened that window kills Firefox.

I have experienced this at least 2–3 times. The last time was within the last week.

Expected results:

I expect Firefox to make calls to Windows COM stuff like Open File in a separate, dedicated process so that killing that process does not kill Firefox but instead just returns cancellation to the webpage. The process should describe itself clearly so it can be identified in Windows’s Task Manager. This would be similar to how Firefox uses plugin-container.exe to let Flash crash without crashing Firefox.

Comment 2

[Sabrina Robertson]

Attachment: same problem

Thanks from ubearcobto1982.