Firefox is segfaulting during seemingly random activities

izomiac · n00b Joined: 22 Jul 2009 Posts: 5

I've been having a very annoying problem with Firefox on Gentoo. It basically segfaults at seemingly random events. It'll happen on webpages occasionally, when I click to allow certain things in No Script, and especially when I "delete" things (related in name only). The most reproducable are when I attempt to "Delete all spam messages" in GMail, delete a gadget in iGoogle, delete a file using Download Statusbar, or delete a profile using the profile manager. This happens with a new profile, and in trying to fix the problem I've upgraded from 3.0.11 (which required me deleting session files after each crash), to 3.5-bin, to the hardmasked 3.5. Other that segfaulting upon certain, unpredictable actions, they all worked perfectly. I'm fairly stumped, does anyone have any suggestions?

bjlockie · Veteran Joined: 18 Oct 2002 Posts: 1186 Location: Canada

I had a similar problem but I never found a solution.
I went for a few months with no firefox.

Have you run firefox from a terminal and is anything printed when it crashes?
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izomiac · n00b Joined: 22 Jul 2009 Posts: 5

I did, that's why I know it's segfaulting (GUI-wise it just disappears). Basically the only terminal output I see is some complaining about firebug not being there and "Segmentation Fault" when it crashes.

izomiac · n00b Joined: 22 Jul 2009 Posts: 5

Sorry to bump, but I've narrowed down the cause a bit. Basically, javascript alert boxes work, but confirm or prompt dialogs will cause a segfault. This is testable on any webpage using a simple javascript:confirm('Test'); or javascript:prompt('Test',''); . I've upgraded Firefox a couple more times, recompiled everything else on the system, and ran revdep-rebuild. What else can I possibly try???

(Segfaults are after going to javascript:confirm('Test');)

Lowspirit · Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2009 9:40 pm Post subject:

I have the exact same issue, not sure when it started but I was running a Firefox 3.6 nightly build for quite some time and then I downgraded when 3.5 became stable and officially released and since then it's crashing on these javascript pages randomly.

Luckily Chromium fills the gap for now but it'd be neat if it Firefox could stop crashing.
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The Mountain Man · l33t Joined: 03 Sep 2003 Posts: 643

I was having a heck of a time with random segfaulting in Firefox until I started using the binary build. I haven't had a problem since.
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Zhaozhou · Posted: Sun Aug 16, 2009 6:45 am Post subject:

Although I can't interpret them, you should get a crash dump pastebin'ed - someone ought to sort out the confusion.

izomiac · n00b Joined: 22 Jul 2009 Posts: 5

I found a work around! It appears that it's somehow linked to the default theme. When using a different theme (Whitehart to be specific) I am able to get confirm and prompt boxes without Firefox segfaulting. It's still a pretty bad bug though, so I suppose I'll try to get a crash dump and report it when I have a free day or something. If anyone else wants to report it go ahead, but I'm cautious to figure out the core problem since I was very close to reporting this as an AutoPager bug, which would have been a wild-goose chase for that developer.

Bones McCracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1611 Location: U.S.A.

Using mozilla-firefox-3.5.2-r1, it segfaults on me every time at launch.

I may have to mask it and go back to a previous version, which means taking sqlite back down as well, I suppose (and maybe xulrunner -- I can't remember what got updated when).
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ripper1340 · n00b Joined: 07 Feb 2006 Posts: 19 Location: Brazil

I can always reproduce this problem by attempting to empty Gmail's trash... Afterwards, firefox will not start until I remove the file ~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile>/sessionstore.js

izomiac · n00b Joined: 22 Jul 2009 Posts: 5

That sounds identical to my problem. See if going to the url: "javascript:confirm('Test');" (no quotes, don't open in a blank tab) crashes your browser rather than open a confirm dialog. If so, I'm still stumped as to the cause, but changing Firefox's theme seems to be a workaround. GMail opens a confirm dialog when you try to delete all the messages in your Trash or Spam folders.

Rüpel · Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2009 3:53 pm Post subject:

my firefox also started crashing a few weeks ago. very annoying.

the "javascript:confirm('Test');" test works ok here. I can see an click the button without a crash. still, random crashes here and there while surfing.

as far as I tried up to now, disabling javascript does help. but have you tried to use the web without javascript these days? :roll:

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Rüpel · Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2009 6:28 pm Post subject:

I've played around a bit with my firefox. running it through strace completely freezes my X-server before anything interesting happens.

running it through gdb produces:

dufeu · l33t Joined: 30 Aug 2002 Posts: 924 Location: US-FL-EST

Which version of binutils do you have installed?
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spindle · Apprentice Joined: 01 Dec 2003 Posts: 245

I was having problems with this too. For me it was crashing when trying to view a photo on flikr. I added these to /etc/portage/package.use