353498 - Zombie Process detector should offer "kill process" option.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 286355

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, enhancement)

Description

[mozilla]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

Currently if Firefox detects a zombie process it says (paraphrased) "Firefox detected another (nonresponsive) instance of firefox running in the background. Please close that firefox or restart your computer." The option at this point to kill a non-responsive firefox would be useful as most new users (observed in my wife, and several co-workers) don't know how to find the task manager, find the processes tab then find firefox.exe and kill it. The problem of zombie processes is common on Windows 2000 and XP, especially when an embedded extension (Adobe Acrobat, or Windows Media Player) fail. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Zombie out a firefox process
2. Attempt to start firefox off the start button
3. Dialog shows, with "OK" option and suggest restarting the computer.

Replace (3) with "kill zombie firefox" button


Expected Results:  
Kill zombie firefox will identify the PID of firefox process and issue the OS-specific command to terminate it, then restart. This behaviour is demonstrated well in the install program when it does a process detect and kill. 

May apply to Linux and OSX, certainly it would not hurt to impliment this functionality there as well.

Comment 1

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

FWIW, this is a dupe. I'm sure I've seen another bug on "we should detect locked profiles and offer to kill that Firefox process so that the user can go about their business, using the same technique that we do in the installer" before. I just don't remember precisely where :)

Comment 2

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Ah, there it is.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 286355 ***