Firefox is a userspace application, meaning it can't crash your whole computer. It Requires a kernalspace application to do that, such as your video driver (have you updated that recently?) or anti-virus / firewall (changes there recently?)

The only reason I say that Firefox crashes my computer because my computer, literally, never crashes. The only reason it has crashed since the beginning of this year, is when I have Firefox running. For instance, early today, I was playing a game, and decided to alt-tab and open Firefox while I waited for it to load. I am usually able to do this without a problem, no freezing problems. But almost as soon as I opened Firefox, BAM my computer froze. Hell, while I'm typing this reply Firefox is freezing constantly, making it a pain in the arse to type. I have never ever had this problem with Firefox. My video driver is up to date, I have my Firewall turned off, and I use Avast! for my anti-virus. Before, I used Avira and I had the problems there as well, when I never used to.

Could you try disabling Firefox's use of hardware graphics acceleration? Sometimes a driver update will expose an incompatibility that causes severe issues.

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 Tools menu) > Options > Advanced

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

If you restart Firefox, is the issue resolved (or at least improved)?

Also, disable the Flash Player's protected mode.

See this support article from Adobe under the heading "Last Resort": Adobe Forums: How do I troubleshoot Flash Player's protected mode for Firefox?

your just set flash player to unlimited, then you will not crach if you wanna play internet games.

Thank you, jscher2000, I will give that a shot. I'll give it a few days to make sure it worked or not, hopefully it will have fixed my problem.

Boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.

Do a malware check with some malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.
Please scan with all programs because each program detects different malware.

Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.

• Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware:
  http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
• SuperAntispyware:
  http://www.superantispyware.com/
• Microsoft Safety Scanner:
  http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx
• Windows Defender: Home Page:
  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx
• Spybot Search & Destroy:
  http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
• AdwCleaner:
  http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/
  http://www.softpedia.com/get/Antivirus/Removal-Tools/AdwCleaner.shtml
• Kasperky Free Security Scan:
  http://www.kaspersky.com/security-scan

You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.

• Anti-rootkit utility TDSSKiller:
  http://support.kaspersky.com/5350?el=88446

See also:

• "Spyware on Windows": http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popups_not_blocked

Seems like jscher2000's post is the one that did it. Haven't had any problems yet and Firefox is actually running faster now. Thanks

I was having the same problem with crashes, and while it seemed related to Firefox I was not sure. There was some evidence from the crashes that it was possibly related to upgrading my Nvidia driver to a 320.** version. The Nvidia support forums seemed to suggest a problem with the latest versions of the driver. Following advice in http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-1790345/display-driver-stopped-responding-recovered-560.html I have now upgraded to version 326.80 Beta. The problem seems to have been fixed.

I had this issue too and wasted a lot of time even though it seemed to start with the update to Nvidia 327.23 drivers from 314.22.

It started with seemingly random mouse lockups and audio stuttering followed by mouse pointer issues on return to operation or the occasional reboot or BSOD STOP 124 error.

I found that removing Webroot stopped it from happening on the desktop but it still happened in Firefox during scroll-wheel use or randomly upon clicking a link.

I figured it was a hardware error and cleaned out all the dust from my videocard and motherboard and moved my videocard and soundcard to different slots. I cloned from my SSD to a regular hard drive, did various virus and malware checks but the problem kept coming up.

During this time Nvidia drivers 331.58 drivers came up in the Nvidia experience (which also appeared with the last update) so I upgraded and problems remained. I then tried 320.49 with no result and had almost written off Nvidia drivers until I found this thread, I went back to 314.22 and it all went away.

I would sure like to know what change started this, until then I will stick with 314.22.

My system

Core2quad Q9550 2.83Ghz Nvidia GTX460 SB X-Fi Fatal1ty Win7 x64

-Lance