Comment by quesera

3 months ago

Describe "demons"?

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

6 comments

quesera

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stnvh  3 months ago

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

  • quesera  3 months ago

    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).

  • roryirvine  3 months ago

    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.

    • quesera  3 months ago

      I don't think "crash" is the right word for the Firefox behaviour. Yes it does pop a window that calls itself a "crash reporter", but in my observation it's a shutdown timer timeout that expires after ~60secs.

      My guess is that it's trying to obtain or release a filesystem lock, possibly one that it's lost track of in some trivial way.

      I've never seen any damage or inconsistencies in the resulting environment. So I don't think it's a dramatic event, just a safety timer that isn't resolved correctly.

      Probably a simple, dumb, but harmless bug.

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