Web browser freezes in Ubuntu

Can you give me some more details about your hardware?

In the meantime put a "kill application" applet on your taskbar so that you can just kill the misbehaving application (whichever web-browser)

Just right click on a taskbar and choose "Add to panel" look for the broken window and choose that one. You shouldn't need to reboot everytime there's a problem like this. Really shouldn't even nee to logout and back in again. Obviously something wrong so i hope this "kill" thing helps.

To use it click on the applet and then click on the misbehaving applications window

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Does your whole system freeze? Or does only the browser freeze?
Is there anything in common with the websites that you were browsing when it freezes (maybe point your browser to some real trivial website with no flash plugin or nothing for some time and check whether it still happens)?

It smells a bit to me like the known-to-be-unstable adobe flash plugin, but I'd need more info to be sure. In that case you can just kill the browser (e.g. put the command "killall firefox" in a terminal) or the plugin ("killall npviewer.bin") when it happens and just re-start the browser.

A complete un-reascue-able system freeze is pretty rare in Linux (happens like once every few months to me, and only if I really experiment around), and what helps if you suspect something to be unstable or to eat up your resources is to have a terminal with "top" running in it open all the time, so you can kill a precess that goes wrong.

I forgot to mention, if you click on the close window button in the window frame, and the program doesn't respond within a minute or so, there pops up a "terminate application" window and you can click to kill the application.

Thanks for the ideas, here is the info on my hardware. Dell Vostro Laptop Intel Core Duo 1.6 ghz. Broadcom chipset. I think the reason might be have someting to do with Streaming video, Flash or Shockwave. It may only happen when I am on those types of websites. Im gonna chart it.
What does the Top command do ?
Thanks.

Hi, thanks for your information. It looks like your problem has the symptoms of this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/226878 . The top command is a command-line process manager. You can also use System->Administration->System monitor

Top lists the processes that are running on your machine and how much hardware resources they use. "<" and ">" navigate you thru the sort options, "k" allows you to kill a process and "q" quits.

Typically if a linux system "freezes" completely because of a software problem (unless the graphics system crashes), then it's because some malicious process eat up e.g. all your RAM. Since top is command line, it doesn't need much resources itself, and it allows you to kill the pundit before it's too late even when a grapical interface program like system monitor won't start anymore.

Now that you say it's when you watch video streams I really think it may be the adobe flash plugin. That crashes pretty frequently and that won't get fixed unless more people use Linux, or someone of us married the son/daughter of an Adobe executive ;) . When your browser freezes try to kill "npviewer.bin" or "npviewer" either through the system monitor or using "killall" in a terminal. Monitoring on which specific sites (i.e. whether they use flash, or which kind of stream) it freezes may be a good idea

I recall a long time ago another bug (that's well-known too) which was that I was running the generic graphichs driver (which is dicrouraged) and _any_ video displayed usage crashed the system. That shouldn't happen if you're running the proper driver for your video card. You can check it by running some video file that's not stream. In which case this bug should cause a crash.

If you are still having trouble with this then please post it as a new question. Only the most recent questions tend to get looked at so posting/reposting a question just before america arrives online gives the best chance of getting a good few answers.

If the problem has been resolved then please follow the link to the forum thread and mark it as Solved.

Good luck and many regards from
Tom :)