[Bug 612131] Re: Unprovoked shutdowns of Firefox

[madbiologist]

I'm tempted to ask what the WSOD (Workspace on demand?) problem is, as I
can't see where you mentioned it previously (although it's getting late
and I'm tired so I may have overlooked something), however if it's a
different bug it doesn't really belong here and should be filed as a
separate bug (if you can't find an existing bug report for that issue).

I'm sorry to hear that the Firefox crashes have become more frequent
again.  Something to note is that although the older ATI Radeon hardware
has good open-source driver support (as I mentioned in comment #9), the
support for the actual Radeon XPRESS 200M does seem to have a few quirky
bugs which have proven difficult to solve.  Since writing comment #9
I've come across one or two bugs where quite a few people are having
problems with the display of Google Earth on the Radeon XPRESS 200M.  I
can't remember if the Radeon XPRESS 200M uses sideport memory or not,
but there is a DRM fix for sideport memory in kernel 2.6.35, which is
the default kernel in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat".  If
you are feeling adventurous you can try this kernel on your 9.10
installation - the 2.6.35.4 kernel PPA is at http://kernel.ubuntu.com
/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

Are you able to try adding a discrete graphics card to that machine to
see if things improve?  Depending on the motherboard, doing so might
automatically disable the integrated Radeon XPRESS 200M, otherwise you
will need to disable it in the BIOS and enable the discrete graphics
card.

Also, I've used several versions of Firefox on the last 3 versions of
Ubuntu (I'm counting the 10.10 alphas and the 10.10 beta as the third
version), and prior to that on Windows and never had an issue with
regular/frequent Firefox crashes.  Recently, for the first time I had
quite a few crashes with Firefox 3.6.9, however this has mostly gone
away with the latest Firefox 3.6.10 update, so I encourage you to try
that.

Hopefully the number of crashes is reduced once Firefox 3.6.10 is
installed.  Either way, let us know, and then if you are able to, try
disabling extensions one by one and see if things improve.  Note that
the apport-collect -p firefox 612131 command I mentioned in comment #20
will give us a list of all of your extensions, among other things.

I presume your Flash player version is up to date?  Also, I just had a
thought - are you using Ubuntu 32bit or 64bit?  If it's Ubuntu 64bit,
are you using the 32bit Flash player or the 64bit Flash player?  Adobe
neglected 64bit Flash player development for Linux for a while, and
people using the old development versions of the Linux 64bit Flash
player were reporting crashes.  Adobe have recently addressed this
situation with a new Linux 64bit Flash player - see
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODYwMg

Finally, on the Windows XP (SP2 I think, or maybe SP3?) machines where I
work, we use Internet Explorer 8 quite heavily and it is not the most
stable application I've seen.  Each user including myself (and I always
try to be careful) gets about 5 or 6 IE8 crashes per day.

-- 
Unprovoked shutdowns of Firefox
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/612131
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Mozilla
Bugs, which is subscribed to firefox-3.5 in ubuntu.