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Comment by stnvh

3 months ago

Try running two instances of Firefox in parallel with different profiles, then do a normal quit / close operation on one after any use. Demons exist here.

Describe "demons"?

I run four Firefox instances simultaneously, most of the time. No issues to report.

  • Long hangs / never closes, crash report screen triggers often. macOS. This occurs for me when launching instances from the about:profiles page and using each instance for what I'd describe as normal use

    • I see. Yeah, I've seen this.

      It seems more likely to happen when the profile has been running for a long time (a couple weeks?) and/or using a large amount of RAM.

      There's a 60-secish timeout before it gives up and pops that crash report window. I don't think it's a crash per se, just an unresolved file lock or similar. I haven't noticed whether there's any relationship to running multiple profiles. I am almost always running several at a time, and the issue only occurs sometimes. It has no (other) negative side effects, as far as I can tell, but it was unsettling at first.

      I'm on macOS also, and I launch from the command line (effectively, I actually have separate launchers for each profile, but they just run a shell script with different arguments).

    • Same, also on macOS. My "personal" firefox profile on my work Macbook Pro, which I use for occasional gmail, HN, wikipedia, and pretty much nothing else, has crashed twice in the last 6 weeks - both times when shutting down to update the OS.

      Honestly, I've been blaming MacOS for it since other apps also crashed at the same time (the first time it was Microsoft Intune, the second time it was Slack - I doubt either uses Firefox internally). I don't recall seeing a Firefox crash on my personal laptop running Linux at any point in the past few years.

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