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firefox package

Firefox 13 hangs on shutdown

Asked by Frederick L Shope

When I shut down Firefox 13, instead of stopping normally, it disappears from the screen after some delay, but the system monitor says it is still running and occupies one of my processors at 100%. Only by killing the Firefox process from the system monitor or with the kill command from the terminal can I stop it. Prior to shutdown, Firefox seems to function correctly.

I am running Firefox 13.0.1 and Ubuntu 11.10. The system is up to date according to the Update Manager.

The failure occurs on every use of Firefox. It occurs if I start Firefox and immediately shut it down without accessing a web site or using any other menu function. Sometimes after I issue a shutdown command, I get a dialog box saying that Firefox is not responding.

I believe the problem began after one of the normal updates via Update Manager that installed Firefox 13.

I have not tried removing and reinstalling Firefox.

I also have Firefox 13 running on an older, single processor machine from the same vendor (Pogo Linux) that is running Ubuntu 11.04. That instance of Firefox 13 does not have the problem described above.

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Frederick L Shope
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Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#1

Yep, sometimes it eats mem or causes high cpu (hear the fan and stare at conky), but gave up to report.
Query 'firefox 13 eats mem high cpu' brings up millions of entries.
Variety of culprits like flash or rather plugin-container, just kill the plugin-container and test if it gets better.
Unity, HUD can leak or global menu bar. bug 987060

To exclude, either
- test firefox in -safe-mode (GUI: help -> restart with addons disabled)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode

- create a new clean profile with firefox -P
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles

or
- login to guest account and try firefox there

Revision history for this message
Frederick L Shope (flshope) said : 		#2

Thank you Sam_.

Per your comments, I started selectively disabling various extensions. I found that if I disabled the extension 'Ubuntu Firefox 1.0.4 Modifications', the problem of Firefox hanging at shutdown goes away. I don't know what I lose by disabling this, but I will work in this mode for a while and report any further problems.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Revision history for this message
Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#3

Frederick, thanks for sharing.