Firefox suddenly opens about:processes tab and then closes itself
Hello everyone,
yesterday I got quite a scare. While Firefox was open, a new tab briefly appeared showing the page about:processes, and immediately afterwards the browser closed itself on its own.
At the same time, Chrome was open in the background. When I clicked on Chrome, a prompt appeared asking whether I wanted to allow changes to be made to the system (the typical UAC prompt). However, I’m not entirely sure if this was actually triggered by Chrome or possibly by another application.
I clicked “No” on the UAC prompt and immediately unplugged my keyboard. I recently started using an ASUS ROG Falcata, which is connected via USB.
After that, I ran a virus scan with Windows Defender — it didn’t find anything. I also ran AdwCleaner, which also came up clean.
At first, I suspected the ASUS ROG Falcata (I’ve only been using it for a few days), since it’s almost like a small computer itself and can execute macros, patterns, etc. I was worried about a possible firmware bug or something worse. At the moment, I’m honestly hesitant to plug it back in and am using an old Dell keyboard instead.
Importantly, I wasn’t pressing any keys at the time of the incident.
Now I’m quite unsure what could have caused this.
Is there any way to trace this in Firefox (e.g., via logs)?
And is there any (event) log where I could check what triggered the UAC prompt?
One more thing I noticed: I shut down the PC afterward and turned it back on later that evening. Everything booted normally and is still running fine today. However, Firefox updated itself yesterday from version 148.2 to 149. Maybe that was somehow related (though there’s no indication in the Firefox update history that anything failed or similar).