975035 - Firefox hangs upon closing, after creating a URL shortcut(desktop), IF Flash is active

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Jacob Johnson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140212131424

Steps to reproduce:

Start Firefox
Browse to a page which starts a plugin like Flash (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles) (I have no idea where Flash is on this page, but it works)
Drag the URL bar icon to the desktop, creating a shortcut
Close Firefox


Actual results:

plugin-container and children terminate, but the firefox process does not (even after hours)


Expected results:

firefox.exe should terminate when the last window is closed

Comment 1

[Jacob Johnson]

A new profile was created to confirm this bug's existence.

Security software was disabled to confirm.

A crash report was triggered and is available here:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/09cbbb0f-ce05-4b64-abf6-008512140220

Reproducibility is not 100%, but it is fairly often.  It seemed like ~50-75% for me, at least.  I've been seeing this bug for a while but hadn't debugged the cause/steps until now.

Comment 2

[Camaleon]

I'm experiencing a very similar issue on Firefox 29 (32 bits) and Windows XP (tested in both, 32 and 64 bits). As soon as "plugin-container.exe" process is triggered by any means (e.g., by loading a site with Flash Player video), when I try to close Firefox I get this:

1/ Firefox (the browser itself) is closed.
2/ "plugin-container.exe" process is terminated.
3/ "firefox.exe" process remains running at the background.

So, when I try to open Firefox again I get a popup error warning about a second instance is already running. Terminating the process allows Firefox to be opened but this is, of course, very annoying.

Comment 3

[Camaleon]

I've been trying a workaround I've seen at Mozilla forums and have disable (unchecked) "[ ] Clear history" from Privacy settings which seems to mitigate this issue and now "firefox.exe" process seems to close just fine when Firefox quits. 

Maybe the bug reporter can test this setting and provide some feedback.

Comment 4

[Jacob Johnson]

(In reply to Camaleon from comment #3)
> I've been trying a workaround I've seen at Mozilla forums and have disable
> (unchecked) "[ ] Clear history" from Privacy settings which seems to
> mitigate this issue and now "firefox.exe" process seems to close just fine
> when Firefox quits. 
> 
> Maybe the bug reporter can test this setting and provide some feedback.

My first comment states that I confirmed using a new profile... which means there are no altered settings.  By default, FireFox does not delete history on exiting.  As a side note, I have never had FireFox delete browsing history or anything like that.

Comment 5

[Camaleon]

Thanks Jacob for your reply. I must be then experiencing a different issue (probably #970923) so sorry for the noise. I'll report my problem there.

Comment 6

[Vlad Bacia-Mociran [:VladB]]

I didn't managed to reproduce this issue on the latest release(43.0.4) nor the latest Nightly(46.0a1). I've tried this scenario on different pages that use Flash plugin but all is working as expected.

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0
Build ID: 20160105164030

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0
Build ID: 20160106030225

Can you please try to reproduce this on the latest release(43.0.2) and latest Nightly(46.0a1) and provide the results?
When doing this, you could create a new clean Firefox profile, or maybe test in safe mode, as some of this issues may be caused by third party installed addons or custom settings
(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-and-diagnose-firefox-problems).

Thank you,
Vlad

Comment 7

[Jacob Johnson]

Though my habits since this report two years ago have changed to avoid this bug on purpose, it's not surprising that the bug may have vanished in those two years.

So far I am unable to recreate it again in the same manner.  The only thing close to it was that on my first attempt, the process hung for maybe 30 seconds then spawned crashreporter.exe, allowing both to close.

If the worst I can do is get Firefox to detect its own crash, then the issue is either resolved or different than reported.  If I can get it to occur again on a later date, I may comment here again.