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Blue Screen Crash since Update to Version 20.0

  • 27 replies
  • 26 have this problem
  • 5 views
  • Last reply by John99

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I have gotten a blue screen crash several times, while using Firefox, since the last update (to 20.0).

I have several unsent crash reports. If you need them, please let me know how you'd like me to send them to you.

I have gotten a blue screen crash several times, while using Firefox, since the last update (to 20.0). I have several unsent crash reports. If you need them, please let me know how you'd like me to send them to you.

All Replies (20)

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If you type or paste about:crashes in the address bar, clicking a crash ID will submit it Mozilla where it can be correlated with crashes submitted by others. This could take a few minutes. Then you can paste that ID number into a reply and a volunteer can look it up on the crash server.

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I have regular crashes regarding the flash player also, and I just upgraded to Firefox 20.0 on Tuesday 4/2, but here are the crashes up to then.

8660b6a2-e44e-4b36-a13a-d36d8c7004a5-flash 24/2/2013 11:12 AM
8660b6a2-e44e-4b36-a13a-d36d8c7004a5-flash 14/2/2013 11:12 AM
8660b6a2-e44e-4b36-a13a-d36d8c7004a5-browser 4/2/2013 11:12 AM
8660b6a2-e44e-4b36-a13a-d36d8c7004a5 4/2/2013 11:12 AM
bp-02bf71f4-4b67-44a8-8b70-bf71f2130330 3/30/2013 3:09 PM
0c4920f0-4c09-413a-970c-5db5c1f88eae 3/30/2013 12:21 AM
bp-0d1c81ea-96af-43e9-89eb-df94e2130329 3/29/2013 3:32 PM
bp-2e3dbd2a-7adc-41b1-b6ba-a73c92130327 3/27/2013 3:30 PM
fd4f0111-e18e-4731-84f1-6d5bcd9592ea-flash 23/26/2013 12:26 PM
fd4f0111-e18e-4731-84f1-6d5bcd9592ea-flash 13/26/2013 12:26 PM
fd4f0111-e18e-4731-84f1-6d5bcd9592ea-browser 3/26/2013 12:26 PM
fd4f0111-e18e-4731-84f1-6d5bcd9592ea 3/26/2013 12:26 PM

In my original post, I indicated that I have several UNSENT. I didn't turn them off. I turned off report that sends my usage data, but specifically left crash reports on. For the ones that aren't sent.. (They aren't sending since the update.).. How do I get them to send to Firefox so you can look up the numbers after I post that info? - Annette

Modified by cor-el

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In case you need to see it to believe it....

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Two of the three that shows as links in your post are Flash related; the third couldn't be interpreted for some reason. Are these the kind of crashes where the Flash plugin dies but Firefox still runs normally?


Your plugin list shows two different versions of the Flash plugin. This may not impact your problem, but you should delete the older one for security reasons. It can be found here:

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash

You want only the latest NPSWF32 DLL file, which as of this moment is:

NPSWF32_11_6_602_180.dll

Delete any earlier NPSWF32files.


The other thing I suggest is to disable all the plugins except Shockwave Flash and Adobe PDF, and see whether that helps. Some of them you might need to turn on, but the goal is to rule out as many potential sources of conflicts as possible. You can do that here:

orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons > Plugins category


Since the release of Flash 11.3, there has been an issue on some systems with Flash's protected mode. As a temporary workaround and/or diagnostic, this can be disabled. See this support article from Adobe under the heading "Last Resort": Adobe Forums: How do I troubleshoot Flash Player's protected mode for Firefox?

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I will do these things tomorrow, but to answer your questions:

Yes, the flash crashes are now letting FF continue running. it just freezes for 2-3 min while it the flash player crashes.

The other one... where you don't get enough info....... IDK.

When I get the blue screen (which happened only once before the updated Firefox, but has happened several times in the last 48 hours since I installed the upgrade), the blue screen freezes at the point where it says it's creating a dump report.

The "links" in the stuff I sent earlier - surely you can see that the date and time is listed for each link, and since there isn't any parsing there, the AM and PM for each time I sent didn't have a Space before the next crash report number?! Do you want me to resend that, without the dates and times, so you can get the links without trying next time?

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I was able to pick out a few IDs and paste them on the crash-stats site, but it said they had not been submitted yet.

Your mention of blue screen makes me think of device drivers. Could you try disabling Firefox's use of hardware graphics acceleration?

You usually need to restart Firefox in order for this to take effect, so save all work first (e.g., mail you are composing, online documents you're editing, etc.).

orange Firefox button or classic Tools menu > Options > Advanced

On the "General" mini-tab, uncheck the box for "Use hardware acceleration when available"

Hopefully that will help with the non-Flash issues.

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OK, jscher. Thanks for your help tonight! I'll post tomorrow how it comes out after I do what you suggested.  :)

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Hello, i have the exact same problem of recurrent Bsod since firefox was updated to v20 earlier this month. I thought it was something else, but after checking for badware or hardware problems, i am positive it is related to this update.

It happens mostly when i close FF, but also sometime when the computer is idle with only FIrefox open.

On another forum, someone said it might be related to his graphic card which happen to be the same generation as mine ( his is HD4870, mine is HD4890 ).Yesterday, i have desactivated hardware acceleration for FF , but i got two more blue screen since then. I can't downgrade my drivers because of the games i am using. And i don't know if i can go back to a previous FF version without losing all my opened tabs ( i have a ton of tabs saved).

So i am at the point where i avoid opening FF when i don't need it, or i use on a laptop with a GT550M and where it works fine. I am considering upgrading my graphic card, even if i am not sure it will help; but i'd like to know if this can be fixed another way, because, i don't want to reinstall chrome.

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Hi Skaldir:

First, when you say you have tabs saved, you mean you rely on the session restore feature to keep all those tabs available? Since that's somewhat fragile, and you are experiencing a lot of crashes, you might consider using the Session Manager extension (I haven't tried it myself):

Second, do you have any crash IDs associated with these blue screens in the list you can access using about:crashes ? I'm not sure whether Windows lets Firefox capture the information in that kind of crash.

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Thanks you for your answer !

I am currently checking on the Session-manager add on; i'll give it a try on my laptop, but this might help a lot.

I've checked the about:crashes page and the latest reports are from the 06/04/13 so i am not sure if its related since i can't remember exactly which day theses blue screens started.

Reports for april :

bp-f6294f8b-50b2-4399-a732-81fb42130430 06/04/2013 07:03
2f4c4cd7-71a0-4b63-bb37-d752cbdacdc6 06/04/2013 03:02
9cc63c09-825a-4520-9c82-2a874609e99a 06/04/2013 02:54
b6c5a4fe-bad7-4be4-b395-d1c81dc0ec3a 06/04/2013 02:51

However i am also checking on the windows event viewer but i don't know what to look for that might help. It crashed once yesterday and i can see a few errors reports and one critical who is related to the bluescreen.

Modified by cor-el

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Skaldir,

Only one of those crash reports was sent to the Crash server - the one starting with bp- , That one was submitted from Firefox 19.02 and was caused by Adobe Flash crashing.

My suggestion is to "ask a new question" so that we can see your "system details". You may have multiple Flash plugins installed, as the "Owner" of this thread had installed.

Bottom line is that Firefox doesn't have the capability of causing a BSOD all by itself. Those are usually caused by hardware clashes or faults.

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Well , i didn't have much time to look at the problem last week, so i just uninstalled flash player and reinstalled it after letting FF run with a hundred of tabs opened ( over 2GB of ram used ) for a few hours. Somehow i didn't get any crash last week when i used FF. But earlier today i just got one after a few hours of use.

After googling a bit i found this article  : http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Apr/9  ; could it be the reason for theses crashes ? Though i am not sure since i haven't seen that many thread about this issue, this may explain why these bluescreens are so random.

I redesactivated hardware acceleration, in case it may help this time, but it is only a temporary solution. Should i try to use a pre 11.5 Flash version ?

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@jsher - I am sorry I didn't get back to this earlier, but am really glad I backed up my data on 4/29!. It may have been that Firefox 20.0.1 was the final blow, but it turns out that I had a physical hard drive failure. I think I only lost a very minimal amount of data, which was unable to be recovered from the backup. The backup the day I decided I'd better do one just to be safe took over 8 hours. The restore of all 72GB took about 80 minutes!

My problem now is that I had MANY, MANY bookmarks, and Firefox is supposed to be keeping 10 (?) of the most recent bookmark backups, and the only one I can find is dated 8/12/12. Is there a place I can look for them other than /users/(username)/desktop/bookmarks?

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Wow, hard drive failures are awful, I can confirm.

(1) Your bookmarkbackups folder is in your old profile folder. To access that, try:

\users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

The .default folder or the most recent probably contains your latest set of bookmarks.

(2) You might need to turn on viewing of hidden files first in order to find that folder. By default, the AppData folder is hidden.

On Windows 7, you can make hidden files and folder visible using Windows Explorer:

Organize > Folder and search options > View tab or
Tools menu > Folder options > View tab

At that point, you should see radio buttons to hide or not hide. After unhiding, AppData will become visible in your Windows user folder.

Any luck?

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I already change properties to "show hidden files", and searched the backup (and the restoration) for backup files. I have tried everything that the Mozilla pages suggest, and searched for the AppData folder (the only thing it contains is Microsoft Outlook (I don't use it.) and Hotmail information. I've searched for bookmarks, the bookmarkbackups folder, any JSON folder, history.dat. SO, should I conclude that the missing bookmark files are either probably not backed up by the Western Digital backup, or they were on the part of the old drive that was damaged?

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I'm not familiar with how your backup software works, but if the file isn't in your backup anywhere, that seems to be the end of the search, unfortunately. You might also search for places.sqlite, the database files that stores history and bookmarks.

Did you ever import your Firefox bookmarks into any other browser? If so, the might be wherever that browser stored them.

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I also have been experiencing BSODs when I close Firefox. It doesn't occur every time I close the browser, usually only when its been open for a while and it has many tabs open. Its been happening since 20.0, but I just upgraded to 21.0, so we'll see if that helps.

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Hi whardwick, if you have a digital camera or phone camera, could you take some snaps of those blue screens when you see them? Once you have a little more data, you might want to start a new question including your system details (e.g., OS version and add-ons). You can do that using this link:

https://support.mozilla.org/questions/new/desktop/fix-problems

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Attached is a screenshot of the bluescreen. I don't think its valuable to open a new topic since I've been having the exact same issue on the same OS and browser version. Well, the same issue as Skaldir at least.

Modified by whardwick

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Hi whardwick, unfortunately Microsoft's page on that particular blue screen (Bug Check 0x3B: SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION) is very general: "This error has been linked to excessive paged pool usage and may occur due to user-mode graphics drivers crossing over and passing bad data to the kernel code." It's hard to think of what Firefox is doing when it is shutting down that would fit that description. One guess would that some pages contain plugins that attempt to store data or display a message when you navigate away from them, which is being triggered by the shutdown.

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