930460 - "Firefox already running" window should offer an option to terminate firefox process

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Session Restore, enhancement)

Description

[Gabriel Koritzky]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131023004005

Steps to reproduce:

By now, everyone has probably seen the "Firefox is already running, but not responding" window. It explicitly asks the user to "terminate the process or restart your system."

Regardless of what causes this state, this is a message that affects almost every Firefox user at some point, and the vast majority won't know what to do with it, nor how to prevent it. To them, this is a nuisance - many won't even know how to terminate a process, they'll have to restart their systems.

To help minimize this trouble, it would be helpful to have, inside the "firefox already running" dialog window, either:

Option 1: A "Force terminate" button that instantly kills the process; or
Option 2: A "Force restart" button, that kills the process AND starts Firefox again; or
Option 3: A "Read more" link that opens a separate help window showing only the contents of this page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-already-running-not-responding

Question: Should we give users the option to terminate the Firefox process?
Answer: Yes.
Explanation: Consider that the official recommendation for this problem IS (on both the error message and the support page) that the user should manually terminate the process. This is what users would do anyway, the terminate button is a convenience.

Comment 1

[Cornel Ionce [:noni] [Hubs QA]]

I agree, this would be a very helpful enhancement.