Update Totally Hosed My Firefox

[motsteve]

Thanks guys. I'll try the other browser and I'll disable my Flash. I suspected that also, but I'm no expert here and didn't want to break the limbs of my directory tree.

[budhi1976]

Thanks very much,

I disabled the plugins and my firefox back in action.

Once again, thanks very much.

Hope another update will come really soon.

I'm having the same issue as of 10 minutes ago when I applied the firefox update...but I found that it's caused by the flash plugin. I disabled the plugin from within Firefox and the browser stopped freezing. In fact, I'm using it right now to type this. Hopefully, another update will come later in the day to fix this flash issue. The reason I thought it was flash from the beginning was that this version 3.6.4 is going to be the one that adds flash process isolation to firefox. That makes flash the logical cause of any issues we may have during this particular period of firefox development.

[TheSqueak]

Aah, thankyou. Disabled the flash plugin and mine seems to be stable again.

Now I can stop having cold sweats

[motsteve]

To avoid the cold sweats next time, I installed Opera and SwiftFox. SwiftFox still hangs like Firefox with the Flash enabled, but Opera runs like a champ. I never used it before, but I had heard of it on the forums for years.

I also fixed my menu problem, but I had to do it manually. If anyone is interested in the details of that, just email me.

[EARNEST]

i have the same issue :/

[lovinglinux]

Next Firefox version will come with a feature that prevents the browser from crashing or locking when viewing crazy flash content. It is awesome. If you don't want to wait, you can test it already. See this.

[MattP220]

I'm getting this problem myself. Gmail crashes it every time without question, and it's happened on a few other pages that didn't seem so JS/flash happy. Facebook and Twitter web interfaces work just fine, so I have no idea what's doing it.

I'm using the daily updates repo, with Namoroka 3.6.4pre

[misterbk]

These facepalm moments are what keeps me from recommending Ubuntu as a regular OS...

Isn't there a process where someone would test this before it went into the repository?

I'm doing some 'computer fixin' for a friend who only does internet, facebook, email and word processing, running on an ancient Dell with failing hard drive and no OS reinstall media. I was about to recommend an Ubuntu install but... yeah.

Is this an issue that affected all Ubuntu installs, or is it like warfacegod said and you had to have turned on pre-release updates?

[eMJayy]

Ok, I've figured out what's going on.

Basically, it's what I suspected all along. Firefox developers have started to add the code for process isolation to Namoroka 3.6.4 but it's not working properly yet.

Since version 3.6.2, I've observed that Firefox on Linux now has 2 processes while running - firefox and firefox-bin. Today, however, I noticed that since the update, whenever a site with flash components is loaded, a third firefox-bin process is loaded, presumably to contain and isolate the flash data. Whenever this process loads,however, the browser freezes.

I was able to find out which settings in about:config control the flash isolation behavior. Here goes:

Type about:config in the address bar
In the filter pane, type ipc

The filter should produce the following four config lines -

dom.ipc.plugins.enabled;false
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.libflashplayer.so;true
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.libnptest.so;true
dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs;10


To turn off the flash process isolation, change the second line (libflashplayer.so) to false and restart the browser. Then re-enable flash and the browser should be able to load flash pages and play flash video as usual.

[misterbk]

So if it is not working, why was it rolled out?

Is this an issue that will affect a "default" install of Ubuntu, or does the user need to have modified a repository setting to be given the new, broken Firefox?