How to diagnose crashing Firefox?

pickarooney

My Firefox has been crashing a couple of times a day for about a year, through all the various updates up to and including v11.0.

There doesn't seem to be any particular pattern. It can crash when flash is running or without, often on very simple sites and never in a reproducible way.

I've tried disabling every extension in turn but the problem still persists. I'm thinking either a plug-in is at fault or a dodgy profile. Distro is Ubuntu 10.10 running XFCE.

I have the following plugins:

Adobe Reader 9.4

File: nppdf.so
Version:
The Adobe Reader plugin is used to enable viewing of PDF and FDF files from within the browser.


Google Talk Plugin Video Accelerator

File: libnpgtpo3dautoplugin.so
Version:
Google Talk Plugin Video Accelerator version:0.1.44.15

IcedTea NPR Web Browser Plugin (using IcedTea6 1.9.13 (6b20-1.9.13-0ubuntu1~10.10.1))

File: IcedTeaPlugin.so
Version:
The IcedTea NPR Web Browser Plugin (using IcedTea6 1.9.13 (6b20-1.9.13-0ubuntu1~10.10.1)) executes Java applets.

Shockwave Flash

File: libflashplayer.so
Version:
Shockwave Flash 11.1 r102

Parole media player plugin-in

File: parole-player.so
Version:
Media player browser plugin for various media format version 0.2.0.2

Picasa

File: npPicasa3.so
Version:
Picasa plugin

There are a couple more listed in Add-ons manager as disabled but without an option to remove them - Adobe Reader 7.0, Google Talk Plug-in 2.8.5.0, iTunes application detector


Currently I have the following extensions but even without them I get the crash

AdBlock Plus 2.03
Add-on Compatibility Report 1.1
British-English Dictionary 1.19.1
PDF Download 3.0.0.2
Quick Locale Switcher 1.7.8
WebMail Notifier 2.9.4
Ubuntu Firefox Modifications 0.9.4 (disabled)

Has anyone got similar issues or does anything stand out?

Rambo

I see you or missing one, a java plugin
this could crash firefox when it hits a java based web page

human 19

Rambo wrote: »

I see you or missing one, a java plugin
this could crash firefox when it hits a java based web page

does icedtea not handle all the java in a browser?
from synaptic:
IcedTeaPlugin is a web browser plugin to execute Java applets, supporting
LiveConnect/JavaScript. It is targeted for xulrunner-1.9 and compatible
browsers that support the NPAPI.

IcedTea is a temporary fork of OpenJDK


I would also check the file /etc/var/syslog to after a crash to see if it showed anything different

How about running firefox from a terminal, and leaving the terminal open? That just might show you the reason it crashes next time

pickarooney

I get a bunch of these errors from the command line, but they seem harmless enough. I can get a couple of hundred a day without it crashing.

(firefox:9837): Gdk-WARNING **: XID collision, trouble ahead

humbert

Terminal seems like a good idea. Have you had it open from the terminal during a crash?

PrzemoF

Get familiar with gdb. Run firefox with gdb, when it crashes you'll get some info why & where it crashed. You might need to compile firefox or install debugging info depending on the distro you're using.

More info here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_a_stacktrace_with_gdb
http://www.lashi.org/writing/guide_to_gdb_1.1.pdf

Ant

pickarooney wrote: »

I get a bunch of these errors from the command line, but they seem harmless enough. I can get a couple of hundred a day without it crashing.

Hi pickarooney,

The important messages are the ones sent to the terminal by firefox just before it crashes. You can ignore all the rest as some of them are just notices or warnings rather than errors.

If you don't get any useful information from that, I'd recommend trying the strace command. I'd recommend reading this good tutorial on the use of strace and then launching Firefox using something similar to:

strace -o ~/firefox.trace.log /usr/bin/firefox &

Ant

PrzemoF wrote: »

Get familiar with gdb. Run firefox with gdb, when it crashes you'll get some info why & where it crashed. You might need to compile firefox or install debugging info depending on the distro you're using.

More info here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_a_stacktrace_with_gdb
http://www.lashi.org/writing/guide_to_gdb_1.1.pdf

Thanks for that info. I wasn't aware that Firefox had a gdb option. I wonder if the output is much more informative than that which you'd get by running Firefox through strace.

PrzemoF

I'd say everything has a "gdb option" I'm using it do debug xorg over ssh..
If you get a crash report you can post it even here - we might help you to track down the problem.

Ant

PrzemoF wrote: »

I'd say everything has a "gdb option" I'm using it do debug xorg over ssh..
If you get a crash report you can post it even here - we might help you to track down the problem.

<touching wood>
I was going to say I must check this feature out more thoroughly and it struck me that I don't really need to. I haven't had programs crash on me in ages.

When I first started using GNU/Linux in the late 90s, I was using strace on a regular basis to diagnose problems with software that I was using. One of the things that I loved about GNU/Linux was the fact that I could see exactly what was going on under the hood and fix the problem. These days, I love it because the software "just works".
</touching wood>

pickarooney

Typically it's been four days without a crash now. I've been tricking around with various versions of flash but am not sure if that was the cause.

Diairist

Hi peeps. I'm sure this isn't the right place to ask this but how can one make a donation to Firefox without going through Paypal ?

Thanks.

PrzemoF

http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/

Maybe here?