Wow. It's been quite a while since I remember seeing a really bad Firefox bug. In fact, I'm sure the last time I did, the browser wasn't named Firefox. Today, though, I stumbled upon a doozie.
I clicked on a link to a video, which happened to be a QuickTime video, and Firefox crashed. Okay, no big deal. This is bad, but not unexpected as I've seen this happen in previous iterations when trying to view Windows Media videos. In fact, the latest version of Firefox (at the time of writing), version 1.5.0.6, is actually the result of such a bug.
So what was so bad about it then? Well, when I tried to launch Firefox again, this is what I saw:
This bug is bad. Why? Because your average user has no clue how to kill a running process. Being slightly technically inclined, I knew I could hit CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, find firefox.exe in the list and click the End Process button. However, typical users will have no clue and therefore will be forced to restart their computer in order to launch Firefox again.
Wow.
Hopefully enough people have run into this (or will in the coming days/weeks) that we'll be seeing Firefox 1.5.0.7 very soon.
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Actually, Tom, just to clarify, I am seeing this issue in the latest version of Firefox, version 1.5.0.6:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6
Bernie,
I also get this on the latest version of firefox. I agree that most people would not know how to fix this problem, but I have not heard of any of my non-technical friends getting this. Maybe it is due to an extension.
I use FF portable, and well it is not that stable (could be my set up).
But i have seen this happen a lot.
FF start using all the processor it can, and when u try to reload it, it errors.
The thing is, if firefox was working properly it would just open a new window, so "it" knows something is wrong. A better message would be, FF is not responding, Want to close it or wait?
Seems like Mozilla could make an error like that more user friendly, by providing a second button to kill the other process.
I've been getting this error message for ages. It's quite common when you start piling on too many extensions.
If you hide your profile folder with Hide Folders XP (Windows obviously) you'll get another crazy error message that isn't even remotely true, but that case is probably much rarer.
An irritating bug I've been getting often lately is that Firefox will not open a window when started. The process will just immediately hang. And when trying to open Firefox again new processes are created that also immediately hang.
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I agree that typical users might not know how easy it is to end a running process, but I just wanted to add that this is probably not something that is specific to the latest version.
In fact, since I've upgraded to 1.5.0.6, I haven't had this happen, when it "did" happen on previous versions, from time to time.
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