288091 - "Unable to open new window when Firefox is already running" error message is misleading

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Thomas Rutter]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050323 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050323 Firefox/1.0+

When I tried to restart Firefox after a plugin caused it to crash (not the focus
of this bug report), I received an error message a bit like the following:

"Firefox is already running, but not responding.  To open a new window you will
need to restart firefox".

This error message is unhelpful, because it isn't possible to 'restart' Firefox
when the process is not responding.

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Cause Firefox to hang and close its main window due to a plugin error
2. Start Firefox again by running firefox.exe

Actual Results:  
Above error message shown

Expected Results:  

Possible solutions:
- Open a new instance of Firefox in a new process (may not be possible)
- Attempt to close the process that isn't responding
- Display a more helpful error message detailing how to close the process that
isn't responding, in plain English for non-techies.

Comment 1

[William Bumgarner [:zsinj]]

You can't Crtl+Alt+Del to end the process firefox.exe?
Also, could you provide a report number so that the plugin-related crash can be
investigated with this report?

Comment 2

[Thomas Rutter]

(In reply to comment #1)
> You can't Crtl+Alt+Del to end the process firefox.exe?

Yes, I could.  The problem was with the error message shown, which seemed to
indicate I could 'restart' firefox.

> Also, could you provide a report number so that the plugin-related crash can be
> investigated with this report?

This bug addresses the error message shown upon running firefox.exe rather than
the crash that occurred previously.

The crash is a matter for a separate bug report and is not the concern of this
bug entry.  I have no information about the crash to give you.  It was not
possible to file a talkback incident as Firefox didn't crash 'correctly'.  It
just completely stopped responding.

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

There is already a bug report about suggestion #2. #1 is not technically feasible at this time, and 
suggestions for #3 that make sense on all windows platforms are welcome (it's not easy).

Comment 4

[William Bumgarner [:zsinj]]

After re-reading the initial report, this appears to be simply a result of the
plugin-related crash. Any new details here that are not in your plugin-crash bug
report should be moved there and this report marked "INVALID" because it does
not address any bug seperate from the one that caused the initial crash.

If you submitted a bug report for the plugin crash, please supply us with that
report number.

Thank you.

P.S. You list of "Possible Solutions" could qualify this report for
"Enhancement" status. If you provide a report number for your crash (which I
assume you already have) then action will be taken then with this report.

Comment 5

[Thomas Rutter]

Updating summary to better describe the bug.

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

There are already bugs about making the behavior better, to more closely match
the dialog.