Firefox crashes or hangs in Windows 8
I've recently been lucky to get my hands on Windows 8 from my college (full Windows 8 Professional, not the 90 day trail.) and installed Firefox. Boy was it a mess, I know Windows 8 has yet to be released officially to the public but Firefox will crash and hang and just be all around terrible to use. I've tried Google Chrome and have had none of these problems with it, same as IE (I know IE sucks but just adding it to my trail list). I know flash is integrated into both of those browsers but could that be the problem that Firefox is having when it comes to Windows 8? Anyways my main reason for posting this is to let those who work with Firefox that there is a compatibility problem with it right now.
Helpful replies
My firefox has been crashing constantly since the update to 19, It makes me wonder if you guys even test these releases. I've tried removing plugins, removing add-ons, nothing helps. I'm surprised it hasnt crashed while I was typing this. Firefox has become pathetically unusable. Now I have to go back to either chrome or IE which both are awful browsers. Thanks for ruining the browser I've been using for so long.
Go to answer 4yep, just run the 18.0.2 installer and it will overwrite 19. Before you do change tools>options>advanced>update from automatic to 'check for updates' and don't do anything until you see 19.0.1 available for install.
Then check below to see that the Radeon HD graphics bug is fixed in that release before you install it, that is the main reason for the 19.0 crashed.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/
Go to answer 4Additional System Details
Application
- User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.94 Safari/537.4
More Information
I am sorry I switched to google chrome..maybe I will try firefox in a few months when it will run on windows 8
Hi blord
There is a problem on Windows 8 with Firefox 19 and AMD Radeon HD 6XXX/7XXX graphic display cards.
This issue is currently being investigated in bug 830531.
- bug 830531 - [Win8] crash in XPC_WN_Helper_NewResolve mainly with AMD Radeon HD 6290/6310/6320/7290/7310/7340
(please do not comment in bug reports: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html)
If you have one of those display cards then best is to stay with or downgrade to Firefox 18.0.2 for now.
Hey Jefferson!
the advice to uncheck "Hardware acceleration" was worth its weight in gold! It was so annoying to see Firefox and Windows 8 (!) crash once every hour ...
Thanks!
Latest report.
1. I rolled back windows update to the situation as of Feb 19th ( system restore windows 8 with AMD Radeon HD 7100 in Compaq laptop.
2. I experimented with FF 18.0.2 and with FF 21 ( Aurora) Alpha since I uninstalled FF19, not a single crash or bluescreen.
Acceleration on or acceleration off appears to make no difference. Neither FF nor Windows 8 crash.
I think a windows update around the same time as the FF19 release was part of the problem.
Hi boggedy, there also is a 19.0.1 update for Windows 8 users. See the links cor-el posted here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/952130#answer-413181
I just wanted to say that I had a problem with the latest version of Adobe Shockwave (ver 11.6.602.171) crashing Firefox 19.0.2 on my Windows 8 PC, with a radeon video card. The solution that has worked so far was to install Firefox Beta.
[Edit: Firefox just crashed again when opening Amazon. The browser popped up "Unresponsive script". I stopped the script and it locked back up. I'm trying Firefox Aurora now. No crashes so far.
Modified by Piecemaster