Jaunty 64 bit firefox locks up my machine completely

[NoOp]

On 07/10/2009 01:40 PM, Sean Carolan wrote:
> Ok, so the first time this happened I hoped it was a one-time
> occurrence but it's occurred three times now.  I'll visit a website,
> usually with some kind of flash widget on it and the entire operating
> system freezes.  The last two times this has occured were when I
> visited www.ingdirect.com and www.discovery.com.  When the crash
> occurs it's not just Firefox, and not only X windows but the kernel
> locks up completely.  I can't get console, can't log in remotely,
> can't do anything except hit the power switch and reboot.  This is a
> huge problem, since I generally have at least a dozen windows open at
> a time, with various terminals, RDP, vmware, etc.  It takes me 10-15
> minutes just to get back to where I was before the crash.
> 
> Has anyone else experienced something like this?  Any suggestions on
> how I can keep Firefox from bringing down my entire machine?  I had
> hoped Ubuntu would be more stable than Windows as my primary desktop
> OS, but so far it's not proving to be the case.  At least in Vista
> when a program crashes it doesn't bring down the entire machine.
> Unfortunately there's no error report or stack trace because the
> machine instantly halts before any of that can be generated.
> 
> If you have any pointers or suggestions I'd love to hear them.
> 

Install prefbar:

http://prefbar.mozdev.org/installation.html
(click 'install PrefBar')
This way you can turn flash on/off with a single click.
http://prefbar.mozdev.org/screenshots.html

Try the same sites with flash turned off. That will at least rule out
flash if they still crash your machine.

Another possibility is that you are running up against the hardware
acceleration bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469439
Go to a basic flash & right-click and disable 'Enable hardware
acceleration', see:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Cannot+view+full+screen+Flash+videos
and try the www.ingdirect.com and www.discovery.com sites again.