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Firefox is crashing on certain sites and other situations

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After updating drivers on my laptop, I've been getting an issue where Firefox (and no other browser) is crashing on certain websites. It actually even crashes when I go to the Firefox menu, click help, then troubleshooting. Website wise it was crashing on Youtube before, but I seemed to have fixed that issue after updating flash. However, it seems to be consistently crashing both on the troubleshooting page I mentioned before as well as AFTER logging into Tumblr (sometime only after scrolling briefly). It's happened in some other instances, but not as consistently otherwise. I'm currently using Chrome to post this as I'm never sure quite when Firefox will crash.

What I've tried so far is starting Firefox in safe mode with no success. Clean install where I even backed up profiles in a separate location, so as to avoid that being a possible issue. Still no success. I may be forgetting something else I've tried, so I will be sure to post here if I remember anything else I tried.

That all said, the most recent crash reports I have are: bp-0b80e79c-8101-479b-9d3d-3e8a32150826 bp-376ad03c-66b1-43a6-99ad-9b2ee2150826 bp-830c37aa-e783-41b2-a858-071ce2150826


Any help or even just further insight as to why this is happening would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

After updating drivers on my laptop, I've been getting an issue where Firefox (and no other browser) is crashing on certain websites. It actually even crashes when I go to the Firefox menu, click help, then troubleshooting. Website wise it was crashing on Youtube before, but I seemed to have fixed that issue after updating flash. However, it seems to be consistently crashing both on the troubleshooting page I mentioned before as well as AFTER logging into Tumblr (sometime only after scrolling briefly). It's happened in some other instances, but not as consistently otherwise. I'm currently using Chrome to post this as I'm never sure quite when Firefox will crash. What I've tried so far is starting Firefox in safe mode with no success. Clean install where I even backed up profiles in a separate location, so as to avoid that being a possible issue. Still no success. I may be forgetting something else I've tried, so I will be sure to post here if I remember anything else I tried. That all said, the most recent crash reports I have are: bp-0b80e79c-8101-479b-9d3d-3e8a32150826 bp-376ad03c-66b1-43a6-99ad-9b2ee2150826 bp-830c37aa-e783-41b2-a858-071ce2150826 Any help or even just further insight as to why this is happening would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

All Replies (8)

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Sorry to hear about the crashes and thank you for the report IDs.

Two seems to stem from trying to decode MP4 video, and the third seems more image related, but it's sometimes very hard to tell exactly where Firefox goes off the rails. But the end of the line is in the ATI/AMD graphics drivers in all three cases.

When you wrote --

Almeck said

What I've tried so far is starting Firefox in safe mode with no success.

-- did you mean that you couldn't get Firefox to start in its Safe Mode, or that it still crashed in Safe Mode? Normally Safe Mode bypasses driver incompatibility issues, so that would be worrying.

If you can get it to stay up for 30 seconds, you could try disabling this as well:

(Warp GL - added in Firefox 37)

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste layers and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the layers.d3d11.disable-warp preference to switch it from false to true

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Ah, to be more clear about the safe mode not working I should have said that I opened Firefox in safe mode and was still crashing in those same instances. I'll try the about:config steps to see if that helps and then post my results soon.

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After changing the layers.d3d11.dsaible-warp preference in the about:config page to true I am still crashing, unfortunately.

Any other possible solutions?

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Could you try: Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL.


Perhaps it will be necessary to disable MPEG decoding... I hope not, but here's what I would do if you want to try that:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste media and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the media.directshow.enabled preference to switch it from true to false

(4) Double-click the media.mediasource.mp4.enabled preference to switch it from true to false

(5) Double-click the media.windows-media-foundation.enabled preference to switch it from true to false

That probably doesn't have any effect until after you exit Firefox and start it up again.

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jscher2000 said

Could you try: Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL.


Almeck said

After updating drivers on my laptop...

I've already installed the most up to date driver I can for my system to work properly as far as I'm aware.

As for those settings you recommend changing... would that not disable the ability to view those types of video in Firefox? If that's the case, I'm not sure what the point of that is as that's more of a workaround than a fix in this case. Mostly because I wouldn't be able to view some of the content on the sites I frequently visit. I may be mistaken though, and please let me know if that's the case.

Nevertheless, it seems as though that did not work. Firefox still crashed.

bp-0b80e79c-8101-479b-9d3d-3e8a32150826


That said, do you recommend I revert any of the changes I've mad thus far in the config page back to the default?

I hope there's a solution to this as Firefox has been my browser of choice for... well for many years now. Never have had an issue like this before, and my main computer doesn't have any trouble (though right now it has a dead power supply, but that's unrelated). If I must use Chrome for my laptop, I guess that will work but it's definitely not ideal.

Thanks for all the suggestions so far though!

Modified by Almeck

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That last crash report seems to be from last night. ??

I was thinking that when websites discover your Firefox won't decode MP4 they would switch to Flash instead. Definitely I didn't intend you to not be able to watch any videos at all.

I wonder whether you can roll back the driver update that started this problem? I actually have no idea how you would do that. I do not trust the system restore feature on Windows, since it can affect your Firefox profile folder, but if that's the only way to do it, you could back up the folder first in case there is serious data loss: Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles.

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Last night? That crash report, as far as I can tell, was the one from this afternoon. August 26th at around 5 PM my time. That's odd if it's showing you a different time...

I understand now. That would be ok, if it worked. But unfortunately it did not seem to change anything.

As far as rolling back the driver, I tried that where possible, but unfortunately not all the drivers will let me roll back to a previous version. That was my first thought as well, actually. Possibly why it won't let me is because I was having a slightly more pressing issue that was causing other problems that weren't only with Firefox. The driver updates fixed that issue but presented the new one in Firefox.

Anything else for me to try possibly? If not, that's ok. This is only my backup computer (which is rather old, in terms of computers). I'll have my main desktop computer back and will be back on Firefox soon enough there. Just perplexed at this issue for my laptop's Firefox.

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Sorry, the crashes I looked at were from MP4 decoding, so if the preferences I mentioned didn't turn it off, I'm not sure what other preferences there are that control it.