271300 - Firefox causes processes to hang on OS/X (data loss, cold boot required)

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Miles Lane]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Often, when I run Firefox, I find that I am unable start or close program
processes.  For example, I launched about ten applications after a cold boot.
I then closed and reopened those apps repeatedly with no problems.  I then
started Firefox.  I then tried to open some of the previously closed apps and
they all hung.

The behavior I observe in the "Activity Monitor" diagnostic application is that
the application processes never get started.  Instead, a WindowServer process
gets started for each of these apps and then never quits.  Usually, when the
system is happy, launching one of these programs causes a WindowServer process
to be spawned.  The WindowServer app appears to the start the client program and
the WindowServer exits.

Also, I often find that I am unable to exit Firefox.  What I notice is that even
if I try to force quit the program, "Firefox" disappears from the process list,
but firefox-bin replaces it and firefox-bin cannot be killed by Force Quit.  At
that point, I have to cold boot the machine.

Unfortunately, no stack trace is generated and I don't know how to debug this.

Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Open the Activity Monitor
2.  Open and close Firefox repeatedly until either Firefox refuses to exit or
starting another program fails with that program locking up.


Actual Results:  
Firefox refuses to exit or and OS/X will no longer start other programs.

Comment 1

[Arthur Wiebe]

Could not reproduce with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US;
rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

I've had to force quit Firefox before but even after following your reproduce
instructions for quite awhile, nothing happened.

Comment 2

[Miles Lane]

Rats.  It happens to me a lot (~15% of the times I run Firefox).

Is there some way for me to easily generate a list of all installed extensions
and themes?  It might be a factor?  On the other hand, I have seen this problem
on my machine with a brand new profile, too.

I wish I had an easy way to diagnose this.

Comment 3

[Miles Lane]

My extensions:

WebmailCompose
Image Zoom
PrintIt
GMail Notifier
Resize Search Box
Tweak Network Settings (set to Power)
Yahoo! Companion
Translate
Adblock
Mimetype Editor
Copy Plain Text (this doesn't seem to work for me, BTW)
Disable Targets for Downloads
fireFTP

My current theme is Mostly Crystal 1.0:
http://www.catthief.com/mozilla/downloads/mac_mostlycrystal_fx_1.jar

Comment 4

[Arthur Wiebe]

There's always the chance that it has nothing to do with Firefox itself. Have
you tried a recent nightly build? If not maybe you should try that next.

Comment 5

[Miles Lane]

How can I get the latest build of 1.0 code?  I tried downloading
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2004-11-22-07-trunk/Firefox-mac.dmg.gz
but got:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041122
Firefox/0.9.1+

I also tried:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-0.11/firefox-1.0.en-US.mac.dmg.gz
and got:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107
Firefox/1.0

Comment 6

[Miles Lane]

I can reproduce the problem with:
 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041122
Firefox/0.9.1+

Comment 7

[Arthur Wiebe]

Would this bug be at all related with bug 268782 which you also filed?

I saw something similar with Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O;
en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041123 Firefox/0.9.1+
but creating a new profile seemed to fix things.

Comment 8

[Miles Lane]

*** Bug 268782 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Miles Lane]

Thanks for pointing that out.  I had forgotten about the previous report.  I
marked that bug a DUP of this one, since this report has more extensive
information.  Specifically, I had not made the connection with the hung
WindowServer processes earlier.  It seems that after the hang occurs, each
subsequent program I attempt to launch adds another hung WindowServer process. 
Each of these processes are failing to launch the associated program and then exit.

Comment 10

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 11

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.